Subroto Bagchi – technology doyen, entrepreneur, author of books on leadership and management strategies – calls himself the quintessential Crossover. He has worn several hats and assumed multiple identities, flitting between the conflicts and deadlines of a C-suite in the corporate world and the bailiwick of a change agent within a state government with the rank of a cabinet minister.

His book – The Day The Chariot Moved – chronicles the eight intense years since April 2016 when a series of dramatic developments steered Bagchi into the role of a transformative leader who could fork lightning by re-imagining the template for skill development of the youth in Odisha.

At the end of March 2016, the author was ready to hang up his boots at Mindtree, the Bengaluru-based IT company that he had co-founded in 1999 after a long stint “working among geeks and nerds” as chief executive of Wipro’s Global R&D division.

Several things fell into place through a chain of fortuitous circumstances.

A visit to Mindtree’s Kalinga campus in Bhubaneswar, days before demitting office, sparked an invitation to deliver a lecture on leadership to the top brass of Odisha government’s civil servants. As chance would have it, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik listened in through a live feed delivered to his office.

The upshot of this was that Bagchi was invited to join as chairman of a new entity titled Odisha Skill Development Authority.

Bagchi found the offer alluring but had to wrestle with his deep misgivings about what might prove to be a foolhardy foray. In the end, he overcame his doubts and made his famed Crossover to start work with the state government with all the trappings afforded to a person with the rank of a cabinet minister but settling for a salary of Rs 1 per annum.

“Skill development…is truly about human development,” Bagchi says and the book really is a tale about India growing at the grassroots.

It is also a book about leadership with a difference in that it documents the aspirations, achievements, failures, frustration and the eternal hope that nestles in the hearts of the ordinary people who will themselves to fight their way out of a life of hardship and deprivation.

At many levels, this is a sort of homecoming for the author. He is after all a true son of the soil.

He was born in Odisha and speaks the language having attended a government school and university in the state. After dropping out of a master’s course at Utkal University, he stunned the family by deciding to work as a lower division clerk in the state government before jumping on to the DCM bandwagon as a management trainee.

The wheel certainly turned full circle when he returned to the state as its skills development honcho with a clear remit to turn the whole caboodle of shabby and, often decrepit, polytechnics and skill development outposts into centres of excellence – and, with a little bit of luck, into temples of innovation.

The enormity of the task hit Bagchi after a month-long, 3000 km tour across 30 districts in the state. The heads of the institutions were startled by the hit visit: they trot out inane statistics and bemoaned the lack of resources and a poor crop of apprentices.

Bagchi decided to flip everything around and focus on the one thing that these institutes lacked: a sense of pride. He began to sift data from the institutes based on a 10-6-4-2 questionnaire. The principals of the over hundred ITIs – many of them over 50 years old -- were asked to name the top 10 alumni they are truly proud of. And from that list, identify six who made it big outside the state.

He also wanted to know the names of the top four girls who had studied there. And finally, the names of two students who had not tried to seek a job after training, choosing instead to start a small business nearby.

“Numbers have a magic in them…. You can bullshit me for hours with narratives but numbers seldom lie. The job of a leader is to simplify things so that people can rise above the bullshit, the clutter and the maze,” Bagchi says.

The oddball query triggered alarm and sent everyone scrambling to pore over poorly kept records to ferret out that information.

It is from that exercise that the heroes and heroines of this book emerge: from a frail young woman called Muni Tigga who is a loco pilot with the Indian Railways to Soumendra Das who conquered several tribulations to establish a body repair shop for Hyundai that ratchets up a sales turnover of Rs 8 crore a year.

The book is a layered narrative of many individuals who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and turned their destinies around. At the centre of this incredible mission stands Bagchi – cheering every small achievement, soothing each disappointment.

“This is primarily a book on leadership but not my leadership,” he says. It is a celebration of the indomitable will of ordinary folk who accept every succour and grab every opportunity to refashion their lives.

Bagchi displays great acuity in peeling back the claptrap that has enveloped the very concept of leadership in this country – stripping it down to its bare essence. He believes that what we need are transformative leaders who have the capacity to feel pain – not just the pain of the people but also that of a failed system. From pain emerges purpose in the form of a burning desire to rectify injustice, or avenge a wrong.

But purpose by itself isn’t enough; you need to have clear enunciated goals and a dogged persistence to attain them.

A true leader is one who isn’t cowed by the prospect of confronting an impossibility – and can galvanise people to “take over the task of pulling the chariot”. He argues that transformative change cannot be delivered by one leader, and definitely not by an armchair intellectual who thinks he might have the answers but baulks at the idea of leaping into the trenches and getting his hands dirty.

The juggernaut started to roll on 17 June 2016 – seven weeks after the author came on board. Help poured in from everywhere. When Bagchi decided to instil pride in the students and apprentices at the ITIs and polytechnics by asking the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) Bhubaneswar to redesign their shabby uniforms, the tab came to a staggering Rs 14 crore. Naveen Patnaik didn’t demur; the state will pay.

The initiative started to yield results. The “Skilled in Orissa” label ignited after a high-decibel branding exercise. A trip to Singapore helped the mission plug into the island nation’s world-class Institute of Technical Education (ITE) and threw up the opportunity to send teachers from the Odisha-based ITIs and polytechnics to train there.

More alliances were forged and soon a World Skill Center emerged. It is an autonomous, not-for-profit entity that operates as a finishing school and a hub for polytechnics.

By the end of his tenure, Bagchi is happy to chalk up the wins: Odisha emerges as the top state in the IndiaSkills Competition, ten of the top ITIs in the country are from the state, and some of those trained at the World Sills Center have landed overseas jobs starting at more than Rs 5.35 lakh.

Will the initiative prosper now that the progenitor has gone and a new ruling dispensation has assumed office? Bagchi believes it will. But he is also philosophical: “Our job is to be the catalyst. Our job is to trust the power of good and pull the chariot.”

Saumitra Dasgupta is a senior journalist who writes on economic issues