Success tale: (From top) The ULCCS headquarters; a flyover in Kozhikode being built by the ULCCS; vehicles owned by the society and Paleri Rameshan, president, ULCCS

It’s a revenge of sorts for 50-year-old Paleri Rameshan and his coworkers. About 85 years ago, their grandfathers were pushed to the fringes of society in Kerala. Landlords in the state, then marked by severe caste divides, would not give them work because they fought against social inequalities.

Today the organisation that their ancestors founded with their sweat and blood is all set to build an infotech park — a venture that will provide employment to hundreds of people, including probably families of those landlords who had once cut off their livelihood options. The Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society (ULCCS) has come full circle.

Construction workers own and run the co-operative society named after a small village about 60km from Kozhikode town, where most of its founding members came from. In a state known for militant and highly politicised trade unions, it tells a rags-to-riches story.

Rameshan is the president of the society, the top leadership of which consists mostly of school dropouts who started as stone crushers and worked their way up the organisation. What accounts for its success is the quality work that it produces — and the reputation that it has acquired over the years of completing projects well ahead of deadlines. It has so far finished over 3,000 projects, most of them construction of roads and bridges. C. Alavi Kutty, superintending engineer at the Kerala State Public Works Department (PWD), who is in charge of roads and bridges in northern Kerala, says the ULCCS “not only adheres to the terms of the contract to the ‘t’, but also delivers the work on time with the quality stipulated.”

The ULCCS, which has nearly 950 shareholding members and reported a turnover of Rs 57.75 crore in 2008-2009 and gross profit of Rs 16.89 crore, has decided to set up a Rs 600-crore cyber park on the outskirts of Kozhikode city — the first in Kerala’s backward Malabar region. “The decision to diversify was a conscious one,” says Rameshan.

But while the going is smooth right now, the ULCCS worries about the future. “The children of our existing members are not interested in manual labour as they are educated,” says Rameshan, who was elected president for three successive terms. With education having reached the last worker in Kerala, the first fully literate state, people are moving away from jobs that require physical exertion.

“We see that there is a phenomenal shift in the category of job seekers from uneducated and unskilled to educated and skilled ones,” says Rameshan, whose son is pursing a masters degree in business administration in Mumbai. Rameshan’s father and grandfather had served as presidents of the society. But his son is unlikely to follow in their footsteps.

The shortage of manual labour is one reason the ULCCS is thinking of moving into other areas, such as the three million-square-foot UL cyber park project, which will be a subsidiary of the parent group and governed by the society’s board of directors. All members of the society are its owners. The cyber park, which recently received Special Economic Zone (SEZ) status from the Union ministry of commerce, is expected to complete its first phase in 2011 and be ready two years later.

The glitzy cyber park marks the long journey that was started in 1925 by Kerala social reformer Vagbhatananda and his 14 disciples from a village close to Vadakara town in Kozhikode district. In its early years, members of the society were willing to take up any job that came their way.

“Those were the days of poverty and caste oppression,” says C.K. Divakaran, an executive manager of the society. The jobs ranged from digging wells to fencing to road construction. There was a scarcity of projects, and they often had to travel to distant districts in search of work, most of which was never worth more than a few lakh rupees.

All that changed in 2002. The state PWD approached the society with a major construction project. That was the first project that cost more than Rs 1 crore. “We have not looked back since,” says Rameshan. The ULCCS, which recently completed a Rs 39-crore flyover at Kozhikode, has more than Rs 100 crore worth of orders in hand. It currently employs over 2,000 skilled and unskilled construction workers, apart from 50 graduate and diploma engineers. The fact that they don’t turn down anyone has attracted marginally disabled people too. Nearly 10 per cent of their workers are either physically or mentally challenged.

Their manual labourers earn higher wages than the lowest grade employee of the government. While a male worker gets Rs 350 a day, a woman gets about Rs 230. Every member gets a bonus twice a year, medical allowance, gratuity and a provident fund contribution from the employer.

But in an era when employees are losing their jobs, the ULCCS has more work than workers. “For every project we undertake, we reject many,” says Rameshan, citing an example of how he had to politely refuse a request from a state minister to take up the construction of a stadium in Malappuram.

To counter the problem of labour shortage, the ULCCS is resorting to mechanisation. Says S. Shaju, secretary, ULCCS. “Today only 40 per cent of the construction job is done manually.” The society owns state-of-the-art equipment for stone crushing, road paving machines and concrete mixers, besides a fleet of trucks, excavators and road rollers.

Each project is supervised by a director, who reports the progress to the board. “Our board meets daily at our headquarters near Vadakara,” says Rameshan. Such daily reviews have also helped the society stem corruption.

“The ULCCS has done exceptionally well. And it has progressed without any subsidy from the government for more than 85 years,” says Rajinder Chaudhary, professor of economics at Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, who carried out a study on the society a few years ago. But he says he is not very sure whether a cyber park is the right diversification for a co-operative movement like the ULCCS. It may be a major deviation from the larger objective of the society, he says.

But perhaps there is no other way. There was a time when the offspring of old society members took over from their parents when they retired. The old worker’s shares were transferred to the offspring. V.K. Anandan, who started out as a stone crusher and became director of the society in 1993, says the trend has almost come to an end. If a worker’s son or daughter does not join the society, the worker has to surrender the membership and give up the shares — and get monetary benefits in return. This is perhaps Anandan’s fate, for his daughter is studying engineering in a private college and likely to go for a job elsewhere.

But whatever the fate of the ULCCS, it has written a chapter in the state’s labour movement. Many other organisations in the state are trying to emulate its work. The cyber park, however, will serve as the ultimate testimony of its attempt to build bridges with modern society.