Let’s Do It India

 

Watergates have been a fact of life since human beings started organizing themselves in intelligent groups to reap individual and group benefits.

 

India, the country of Mahatmas and the white-clad Mahatma, likes to see her as somewhat different in this matter. She is proud of her moral and spiritual values and is critical of purely materialistic attitude.  Nevertheless, the Indian business leaders and the media appear to have been very busy over the question of corporate governance since the terrorist hit in Mumbai, followed by the Satyam scam and throughout the global economic meltdown. The serial is continuing like that on television with fodder like IPL controversy brewing at the moment.

 

The elite in India have always been very good at theorizing, pontification and polemics on much thinner grounds than this. We need not be ashamed or sardonic in acknowledging our superior strength in thinking rather than practising or implementing the thought compared to our western counterparts. I know this is not merely genetic but is influenced by concrete socio-economic and historical factors. The colonial education and legacy still dominates our class habits and thinking. The Indian managers behave and act in a way in the US or Europe, while they are seen working differently in India.

 

There was a recent memorable and lucidly written piece in The Economist, which, among many other interesting things, said that the task of rehabilitating corporate India is a daunting one. We long basked in the reflected glory of our information technology firms. But the reputation rests largely on the efforts of very few companies – one of them being Infosys – which are “impeccably” run. The standards in most Indian technology firms, let alone the rest of its 9,000 listed companies, are dismal.

 

Tons of print and umpteenth megabytes of digital pages were taken to describe and lecture on the role of the board, the role of auditors, minority stakeholders and so on and so forth by the media in recent times. The Audit Committee Institute and KPMG undertook a very commendable and interesting poll which spoke meaningful volumes on the different aspects of corporate governance in India. This basically talked about the issues like benchmarking and how the corporate managers have been viewing these as practical challenges to cope with in everyday real-life situations.

 

Are we then surprised by today’s media report of millions of dollars bribing to highly respected public sector corporations in India by the US and global companies to get lucrative contracts? I am not commenting on the actions of the foreign companies not because I think their actions pardonable but because we should feel more ashamed of degrading our national standards to invite and accept seduction by them. I am more than sure like our Indian managers they would mostly behave differently in the West. Corruption is a twin of greed and all human beings irrespective of being an Indian, American or Alaskan may be fallible or prone to greed. But the intelligent, socially aware nations, even in the capitalistic and free-market economies, have evolved mechanisms of social monitoring and protection against unethical practices of profiteering. Did not the famous economist Gunnar Myrdal said in his historical book Asian Drama that the west has far better law and order in corporate life and they have hard culture versus the East’s soft that is poor corporate governance mechanism?

 

Coming back to the present again, now is the time we should put together our act of corporate governance with top priority. The new India is emerging like a Phoenix from the ashes of feudalism and colonialism. Our educated elite class is growing phenomenally even to the anguish and grudging awe of the foreigners (read Westerners). We are democratically stable, have attained nuclear power status, we think we have at least partially arrived. Our managers, scientists, economists, engineers are making not the nation but the entire world proud by their brilliance and force in developing, maintaining, upgrading products, services, organizations, thought systems of unbeatable quality.

 

Like every coin has two sides, our ascension and scaling up also has the danger of having patches of superficiality and superfluousness, a tendency to posturise and make more hype than substance. These trends are seen into the new pseudo mantras of new- age success: a cocktail of traditional values and new verve, a hotchpotch of making money and autosuggestive systems of management and spirituality. In short, a Maha Indian culture which satisfies some people’s greed and some others’ unlimited self love which is a very unhealthy thing in a person or a nation.

 

We the Indian corporate people with global exposure cannot but take the feel-good factor so extensively propagated but with a very large pinch of salt. We are deeply dissatisfied over the closeness, petty bureaucracy, the self-demeaning culture prevalent in our system in spite of all good wishes and efforts. Can we try harder for making our corporate governance more profitable and fulfilling and more aligned to social interest rather than personal or petty group interest?

 

What really takes to build a culture which can assure fair play to a reasonable degree to be practised. If we strike a balance between individual aspirations and group achievement, then the task becomes easier. India is a country of almost boundless energy and optimism which has made us survive through ages of poverty, exploitation and ignorance. We are also deeply indebted to our core spiritual value system inherited through centuries by a handful of leaders who keep the lamp of humanism burning. That is why Saul Bellow cried after seeing Pather Panchali, the internationally famous movie by Satyajit Ray, which spoke of raw human life in the deep of a Bengal village and Gandhi’s life and thoughts, gave strength to Nelson Mandela in fighting against racism in South Africa.

 

It is time for us to look around at our strengths and get together. If we can improve our values and practices at an individual level, our corporate governance will be something the world will try to emulate.