An ardent follower of Captain GR Gopinath and Ratan Tata, Mahesh Chandra Srivastava, Senior Manager (Systems) at Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO), admires the outside-the-box ideas that these two business luminaries have made a reality.

Srivastava says not many Indian business people qualify for the title of great dreamers.
Most are dynastic successors. “But these two, are different. They have not only come up with new visions but also driven them to reality,” he says.

“I feel Ratan Tata was tough and adamant despite his fellow managers feeling the Nano project may not take off,” Srivastava says. Likewise, Capt Gopinath was able to make travelling by air affordable for the lower middle class. These two have also motivated me to think outside the box.”
With about 15 years in IT, Srivastava says he now has enough experience to drive projects on his own.

“I come from a village in Uttar Pradesh and have seen and experienced the poor quality life,” he says. Srivastava’s vision is to become the CTO of government or semi-government organisation: “I wish to implement cutting-edge technology to make process fast, efficient, transparent and provide good services to public employees through IT.”

He cites the example of the Indian Railways IRCTC as a success story and also that of the Indian banks and some public sector undertakings. “The projects have been successful mainly due to the strong vision and tough action by the leaders,” Srivastava claims.

The IT head did not sail through his career. He had to cope with pressure and combat many hurdles initially and had a tough patch trying to change the extreme attitude of his boss, who was replaced after seven years.

“The turning point in my career was in the year 2000, when there was a vacancy in the IT department,” he recounts. “The company management asked graduate engineers of the same grades to show their willingness to shift to IT department. I cleared the written test and interview and since then my job profile has changed permanently, from an Electronics Instrument Maintenance Engineer in the plant to System Analyst in IT department.” Since then, Srivastava has put in almost 11 years in the same company.

“I owe all this achievement to God. I thank the teacher of my intermediate college, my brother and colleagues for motivating me and for the person I am today,” adds Srivastava. To overcome stress, Srivastava chants Om Namah Shivaya and also practises yoga regularly.

“I make it a point to regularly read technical journals and attend seminars and workshops,” he says. Some of his significant achievements include setting up a robust WAN with high uptime due to which most of the IFFCO applications have become the enterprise kind. These achieved 99+ per cent uptime on all WAN links in urban, semi-urban and rural areas and they have been able to maintain this uptime for the past two years. His second major achievement is in setting up high-definition video conferencing within the organisation with no recurring cost. This is being heavily deployed across the organisation using the existing WAN infrastructure.