FMCG distribution legend Bhau Phansalkar passes away: An obituary

'Bhau Saheb' was not globally famous, but was among the pioneers who built HUL and the FMCG industry between the 1950s and the 1970s

Bhau Keshav Shankar Phansalkar, lovingly called "Bhau Saheb" by all, passed away peacefully at a Mumbai hospital on July 7, 2022. By Indian tradition, he had celebrated his 100th birthday in January this year. He had completed full 99 years of an eventful life. He is survived by his daughter, his son, and grandchildren.

Bhau Saheb was born in Indore in 1923 but moved to Mumbai soon after. He studied at the Elphinstone College from where he graduated. He was a fine cricketer, who played in the Triangular and first-class cricket in Mumbai in the 1940s and 1950s. Till he breathed his last, he was a great admirer of Test cricket. He would make acute observations on the progress of any game as he could watch on television. He despaired about the shorter forms of the game.

After his studies in the late 1940s, he joined independent India’s diplomatic service and did stints in Paris and Romania. He loved the elan of Europe and the breadth of European culture, which he managed to enjoy despite his paltry salary. Realising that he needed more money to survive and marry, he had quit in 1951 to join the predecessor company of HUL, the then called Lever Brothers India.

He was interviewed by R Ramaswami and served several roles as sales manager in west and south zones. During his work, he found that his company was totally at the mercy of volatile trading conditions unleashed by a dominant dependence of the company on market wholesalers. He felt the acute need for some system, some order to be able to concentrate on actually developing the consumption market in a country where distribution was extremely complex. But how do you exercise any influence over agents you had no control over? 

His enduring contribution, not only to his employer, but to all FMCG companies then operating was the devising of certain disciplines for which he acquired a great reputation — the TDR (town dozen rate). This denoted the systematic expansion of retail distribution, diluting the devastations unleashed by a cash-short semi-wholesaler community. He emphasised on “handcart sales”, which was a measure of how much stock the authorised distributor sold himself, the weekly PJP (permanent journey plan), and so on. These were things that we, as youngsters in the 1960s and 1970s, took for granted, but implementing such business systems in a marketplace was exceptional truly in the 1950s. In this manner, he practiced — and taught young trainees — the gentle art of exercising influence without authority. Bhau rose to head the national sales function in HLL, as HUL was then known, before happily retiring in early 1980s.

Bhau lived a good forty years after retirement. He was often anxious about surviving on his meagre pension, so he learnt how to invest astutely without taking uncalled-for risks. So far as I know, he did a marvelous job of it. However, thanks to his astute mind and greatly preserved curiosity, he took great interest in global and economic matters, with his hawk-like eye on the effect these would have on his hard-won savings. This explained, for example, his keen interest in Russia-Ukraine conflict at his age of 99, when he started to despair about how his family would survive the mayhem of inflation. No amount of calming or pacification would work. 

Bhau was not famous, few of us become so. He was hugely impactful in the field of market development and distribution discipline when the Indian marketplace was comparatively unruly. He was greatly admired not only in HLL, but also in Bata, Reckitt & Colman, Richardson Vicks, Johnson & Johnson and so on. Strongly and positively impacting a focused community was his enduring accomplishment. Heaven knows how many generations of marketing and sales trainees passed through his watchful eye, many of them are now CEOs in other companies. What Ramakant Achrekar did for cricket, Bhau did for market management. 

He lived his life by the same advice given by the mother of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of USA, "You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime."

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The writer is an author and a business commentator. 

Website www.themindworks.me

rgopal@themindworks.me