Anit Chandarana has an opportunity to drive change. As Chief of Staff in the Great British Railways transition team, he is one of a handful of people tasked with shaping the new organisation that will run the industry.
Chandarana (50) admits that he hasn’t seen his ethnicity as an issue through most of his working life. Having risen to the top table of a national institution, clearly the colour of his skin hasn’t interfered with his career.
Or has it? Only in the past couple of years has he embraced what he sees as difficult questions and chosen to establish himself as a role model for others.
He volunteered for a conversation to tackle difficult questions head-on. Nothing is off-limits, and Chandarana admits that he finds the experience personally challenging.
A private man, he has previously been reluctant to confront the way he has dealt with his Indian background and how it has shaped his work. But he has been reassessing who he is, and what he feels he should achieve in his life.
Chandarana describes himself as Indian British. He was born in East Africa. His grandfather was born in India and moved to Uganda as part of the British Empire. If fact, he went there to build railways.
Chandarana’s family were part of the Indian exodus from Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s, arriving in the UK as refugees. So, apart from his very earliest childhood, he has been British.
He joined the railway in 2003, at the age of 32. And he has been listed by the Financial Times as one of the top 100 leading minority ethnic executives.
RailReview: How have attitudes towards your background changed, from the time you came into the rail industry to how you find them today?
Anit Chandarana: I am more conscious of my ethnic background than I used to be. I used to live in blissful ignorance. I lived in a bubble. I never noticed any differences in the railway that particularly worried me.
Then I started noticing things. Like the lack of senior people from diverse backgrounds. Or in discussions and group sessions, who got to speak and who didn’t.
For me, the big difference is that we now recognise the issues. Previously it didn’t matter as much as it should have done. There is now a really strong desire to look at things from a different perspective. Having uncomfortable conversations between ourselves is now part of how we operate. We face up to difficult truths.
How have you noticed that personally? How has it affected you?
I now recognise my function as a role model for people from diverse backgrounds. I was pretty dismissive of it before - I’m not now.
It was George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter events of last year that really brought that to me. There was a strong surge of people from ethnic minorities responding to that, and that’s my own diverse characteristic.
People were approaching me, saying it was important for them to have a role model, that it was important for them to know it is possible to reach my level in the organisation.
I now know it’s not about me standing up, saying “look at me” - I am not that sort of person at all. It’s about using my voice - for example, at executive committee meetings. I recognise that until quite recently, I was not playing my part.
We did a piece of work last year. There were some horrific findings. People from ethnic minorities were systemically coming out of performance reviews with worse outcomes than their white counterparts. They were not being as successful in internal job applications as their white counterparts. We saw higher levels of job applications, but lower levels of converting those applications into job offers.
There may have been some legitimacy in those outcomes - perhaps some types of people were applying too early, people who weren’t yet ready for the role. But even after removing that, these results were not good.
I felt we should not shy away from the reality of what that told us. One of the reasons for an organisation believing in diversity is that it has a business case. That’s a great by-product. But it’s not the reason for encouraging diversity. Slavery had a really strong business case. No, the reason for encouraging diversity is a moral one.
