Government headhunters failed to find suitable candidate for top post at Hindustan Petroleum

NEW DELHI: Government recruitment agency PESB has rejected all the candidates it interviewed for the job of chief executive officer of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL), marking the third time in recent years that the board has failed to find a suitable candidate for the role at the state-run oil company.

The Public Enterprises Selection Board (PESB) had interviewed eight candidates, including directors of HPCL and Indraprastha Gas Ltd (IGL), on June 14 but rejected all of them.

“The Board has not recommended any candidate for the post of Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) of HPCL and has recommended the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas to choose appropriate further action for selection including Search cum Selection Committee (SCSC) or as deemed appropriate with the approval of the competent authority,” the PESB committee said in a notice.

The post of HPCL CMD will fall vacant on September 1, 2024, when the incumbent, Pushp Kumar Joshi, retires upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 60 years.

PESB has so far been unable to find suitable candidates to head Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), leading to the incumbent at IOC staying on for an extra year after reaching retirement age, while a retired executive was appointed as the head at ONGC.

The Petroleum and Natural Gas Board of India (PESB) interviewed nine candidates (including two sitting IAS officers) for the top post of ONGC, India’s largest oil and gas producer, on June 3, 2021. However, none of the candidates – senior bureaucrats Avinash Joshi and Niraj Varma, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (MRPL) finance director Pomila Jaspal, or ONGC’s director of technical and field services Om Prakash Singh – were found suitable for the post.

The ministry then set up a search committee and appointed Arun Kumar Singh, a 60-year-old retired Indian Oil Corp. (BPCL) employee, to head ONGC. Singh was originally ineligible to apply, but eligibility requirements were changed to consider people over 60. He will serve for three years, until December 2025.

In the case of IOC, the PESB in May last year did not make any recommendation to replace Shrikant Madhav Vaidya, who is due to retire on turning 60 in August 2023. The committee interviewed 10 candidates, including Arvind Kumar, managing director of Chennai Petroleum Corporation Ltd (CPCL).

This was followed by an unusual move: Vaidya, who took over as Chairman of India’s largest oil company on July 1, 2020, will be “re-employed on contract basis” for a period of one year “with effect from the date of superannuation, i.e., from September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2024”, according to an official order dated August 4, 2023.

This month, the Ministry of Oil began calling for nominations for the new chairman of Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), with the selection being conducted by a three-member selection committee headed by the PESB chairman, which also includes the oil minister and former IOC chairman MK Surana.

Applicants should be engineers, chartered accountants and cost accountants with a Master’s in Business Administration from a premier institute and at least five years of experience in leadership roles and the recruitment is open till July 3. As per the recruitment advertisement, the age limit for eligibility to apply has been set at 58 years for internal candidates and 57 years for external candidates while the retirement age is 60 years.

The ministry had initially proposed opening the post to anyone under 61 years of age, which would have made Vaidya eligible for the job, but the proposal did not find support from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

The government then reverted to the old system of appointing the heads of public corporations, with a mandatory retirement age of 60, and invited applications.

Before Vaidya, no chairman of a Maharatna state enterprise had been granted an extension of more than 60 years in recent years. In fact, the government last year denied Ranjan Kumar Mohapatra an eight-month extension to his retirement age as director (personnel) of the IOC.

The current rules for recruitment for director-level positions in public companies allow for consideration of internal candidates with at least two years of service remaining before retirement, or three years in the case of external candidates.

PESB said in its notification for the HPCL top post on June 14 that it had interviewed HPCL director of refineries Shunmugavel Bharathan and four managing directors of the company — Anuj Kumar Jain, Subodh Batra, K Vinod and Sandeep Maheshwari. It also interviewed one managing director of IOC, GAIL and IGL managing director Kamal Kishore Chattiwal.

The board found that there was no one suitable for the top job at HPCL.