Ratan Tata, Guru and Integrity

Ratan Tata, Guru and Integrity

Today in our life, we have banished 'integrity' replacing it with profit making. Here is what Ratan tata says

Feb 14 2007 1:55PM

I was watching Ratan Tata’s interview on CNN-IBN. I must admit that I am his fan. Hence my assessment will definitely be a biased one. This interview was more impressive for me due to a couple of reasons – one may be the recently released film Guru.

Those of you who have not seen Guru – it’s a film where the protagonist – an industrialist, goes on conquering new horizons and achieving new laurels. For him only thing that matters is success. It’s immaterial how he achieves this success.

This is a very important issue for me. In today’s India, I don’t think anybody including the Govt. remembers that India is a ‘Socialist Republic’- a contribution of Late Mrs. Indira Gandhi – she draped mother India with that ‘socialist’ tag. I am not sure – did the Govt. officially change the status?

Anyway whether they have changed it officially or not, one thing is sure, they have thrown out the word from their dictionary by their actions.

I will give one simple example. For BCCI what matters is the amount of contract it has collected from the sponsors. In the process if the poor citizens of the country is deprived of watching of matches – who cares?

Recently Andhra Pradesh Road Transport Corporation has decided to close down loss making bus depots. If in the process, the poor citizens are deprived of the most essential requirement - conveyance – who cares?

Look at any of the ministries – the buzzword is profit. You will ask, ‘what is wrong in profiteering?’ I will answer, ‘Everything, The Govt. is not here for profiteering. The Govt. has certain responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens’.

You will say Govt. gives out so much dole – look from prince to Nithari victims, Govt. doled out compensation. Govt. is so much concerned about the poor people that they even provide appliances for entertainment – Look at Tamil Nadu, The CM is giving away TVs. I will say, ‘Yes, they are doling away as if public money is their father’s property’. The one question comes out crying, ‘where is the integrity and probity in public life?’

I am sure you are shifting in chair, uncomfortable, thinking, ‘what’s the fun? What these have to do with Ratan Tata or Guru or Integrity?’

Let me start with Integrity. If we look the action of all public figures, whether it is political class, corporate class or any other section of the society, we will find that nobody is bothered about integrity. And obviously, we the lesser mortals are following them and banishing ‘integrity’ from our dictionary.

Guru reminds us the present attitude of all of us. Get what you want, the mean? Don’t think about right or wrong. Only things matters are material gain. Our new generation has become so much bankrupt in morality and integrity that we are not surprised seeing IITian involved in drug trafficking in the name of business and profit. We all are aware how the corporate world with the connivance of politicians and bureaucrats bends every rule and regulation ever printed in the rulebook.

Now let me quote from Mr. Tata’s interview:

This is what he says of the corporate responsibilities:

‘But on the corporate responsibility point of view, this would be much more ‘in focus’ if enforcement of violations were also undertaken in an effective manner. There is always a view among some segments of the industrial community that they are above the law and that they can manage the environment’.

This is his advice to new entrepreneurs:

What could I say to them? The idea has to be there, the robustness of that idea is there. The only thing I would say to them, if I could, would be: "Don't compromise your values. Don't add to the destruction of the fabric or ethics in the country. Try to build on it and look at building a better India." Perhaps one thing I would say to most young people: "Have a sense of spirit for your country rather than merely for yourself."

And about Integrity this is what he says:

Integrity is very important to me. I have tried to continue the foundations of the Group in terms of operating with integrity and with a value system. And I would hope that will be followed after me and that this is one of the strengths that we have and differentiators that we have and we should, in fact, nurture it and cherish it and fight for it ferociously.

This interview has inspired me so much that I am reproducing them here in the hope and believe that each of us will get inspiration from them and bring the same kind of integrity in our life and action. I am sure that only will make our country a great country and our nation a great nation.

The world is waking up to a New India

Puneet Bhamba and Nupur Hetamsaria | February 14, 2007 |

With the third wave sweeping the globe, the concept of business has changed. During the second wave, that is the industrial revolution, scale of operations, economies of scale, plants and equipments were the buzzwords.

Machinery and automation were keys to success. Any need for financing an expansion by an established company or starting a new company were met by banks, financial institutions etc. These traditional providers of funds evaluate an investment option based on tangible assets, regularity and certainty of cash flows and past history of a business or the past history of promoters.

With the advent of Knowledge Based Enterprises, which is a direct consequence of the third wave, that is the information technology revolution, the rules of doing business have changed.

Now, technology and intellectual capital have become the buzzwords. Innovation and ideas, the courage to nurture them, and then take them to their logical conclusion are the things that the fund providers look for in such enterprises.

In KBEs, the business idea is untested, the promoters are relatively unknown, tangible assets form very small part of the entire investment, cash flows cannot be predicted with certainty and human beings and their knowledge are considered the most valuable assets.

Sunrise sectors like information technology, IT enabled services, biotechnology, are especially the kind of businesses which can be called KBEs. This is where the alternative modes of raising funds come in and have gained importance.

However, it is pertinent to note that even these players providing specialised funding can also be classified into various types depending upon the stage at which they invest in an enterprise and the kind of support provided by the incubators, angel investors, venture capitalists and private equity players.

Incubators: These provide infrastructure and advisory services to the startups at a very early stage. They encourage entrepreneurship and facilitate growth of new businesses, particularly for high technology firms, by housing in one facility a number of young enterprises, which share range of services.

These shared services may include meeting areas, research library, secretarial services, accounting services, on-site professional and management counseling, and computer word processing facilities.

For example, the Beijing Zhongguancun International Incubator Inc assists companies introduced by the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, to set up or expand their businesses in China and helps attract talents from Chinese universities for these business ventures.

Angel investors: Angel investors are rich individuals funding risky/uncertain ventures at very initial phase. They are usually interested in the field in which an entrepreneur is working and are conversant with the operational aspects. Thus the benefits of angel investors are: experience of funding such ventures and contacts.

They are generally less formal and less public in their approach to investing. This is a common form of funding tech ventures, especially in the US.

Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures was one of the primary financers (read 'angel') of Google in its early phase. Some of the successful Angel Deals include an investment of $100,000 by Thomas Alberg in the online bookshop, www.amazon.com.

At exit, the value of his investment was $26million, a whopping 260 times the original investment. Even better are the stories of the angel investors of Apple Computers and the Body Shop. The returns at exit for both the companies were 1,692 and 10,500 times of the original investment respectively.

Venture capitalists: Venture capitalists are professional money managers (in fact they usually manage something like a mutual fund with much larger investments made by investors), who provide risk capital to businesses at a stage advanced than the angel investors.

In the year 2006, more than $200 million has been invested by various foreign venture capital firms in Indian companies like travelguru.com and AppLabs Technologies.

VCs may be found in many different forms, but all share the common trait of making investments at an early stage in privately held companies that have the potential to provide them a very high rate of return on their investment.

It is pertinent to note that generally funds for venture capitalists are obtained from number of sources while for the angel investors it's generally one source. Further the return expectations of the Angel investors are more moderate as compared to the VCs, which target a higher return.

Private equity players: Private equity (PE) investments are essentially investments in relatively more matured companies at their expansion stage. They usually invest in proven and established businesses.

Private equity firms look for greater control in the company and often take a lot of interest in the activities of the management, usually also guiding them. In practice, most of the VCs often act as PEs and vice versa. The actual difference between a VC and PE is in the stage at which finance is provided and not the actual investors.

PE has recently become the buzzword in India, especially after some of the private equity funds struck gold here.

One such deal was the $300 million investment made by private equity fund Warburg Pincus LLC in Bharati Televentures of India between the years 1999 to 2001. It later sold off two thirds of its investment for $1.1 billion in 2005.

Corporate ventures: These funds are promoted by the large established corporations such as Intel and Motorola, usually in the hope of funding small companies that have technology or resources that larger companies want or need.

Corporate venture capital revolves around the company's goal to incubate future acquisitions, obtain intellectual property licenses and gain access into newer technologies and newer markets.

Cisco and General Electric are two companies known to invest billions annually in hundreds of such companies, then later acquiring them or exiting them.

India Shining and India Poised may just be the slogans created by the media, but the fact is that the world is taking note of the New India and is eager to have a piece of the pie in some way or the other. So angel investors or private equity funds, they are all swarming India right now and we shall make hay while it lasts.

Is India headed the right way?

by Francois Gautier on rediff.com | February 05, 2007 | 14:58 IST

Today, there is a sense of deep satisfaction, of gloating even, in India.

The economy is booming, there are more and more cars on the roads, shares are soaring, a plane is taking off every six seconds, hotels are full, shops do roaring business.

It looks as if India has moved from tamas to rajas, and has come out of its slough of depression and inertia of the last so many centuries, which was characterised by lack of self-esteem, confidence and dynamism.

Today, we see a much more dynamic and self-confident India, galvanised by the liberalisation taking place at this very moment.

But if one looks closer at what is happening here, one is bound to feel a little unsettled. For what we see today is an India veering blindly, without restraint, towards total globalisation and Westernisation.

Yes, there are great values in the Western world: Freedom, democracy, equality (not always though), respect for the environment, less corruption. And India must, and has already borrowed from these qualities.

But since the last two, three years, it seems the Indian political and intellectual mind is pushing these qualities to an illogical extreme, as if it wants to prove to the West that 'we are as democratic, as liberal, as free as you are.'

Thus, democracy in India has been hijacked. It takes a fortune to be elected. Politicians, elected by and for the people, once they are locked in the ivory tower that is Delhi, forget all about the people.

Thus we see that freedom is such an obsessive mantra in India that an artist who paints one of the most revered ancient Hindu gods doing unmentionable things to a Hindu goddess is defended by India's intellectuals.

Thus we see that someone who is part of a diabolical plot to kill Indian leaders and storm Parliament gets the benefit of the doubt from the same intelligentsia in the name of judicial correctness.

This process of copying the West to the point of aping it has, of course, already happened many times in the developing world. And it killed the soul of many countries, making them just another replica of the West -- with a youth that wears the latest Calvin Klein jeans, knows the No 1 bestseller on the Time list, can quote a few lines from Dante, reads The Times of India, but knows nothing about pranayama, has never read a verse from Kalidasa and does not know who Sri Aurobindo is.

The Westernisation of India must not be at the cost of her culture and spirituality. Yet, there are signs that it is already happening here.

You may notice in the Indian media, that there is a witch hunt against gurus, a deriding and mocking of Indian spirituality, a marginalising of Hinduism and Hindus, who constitute the immense majority in India and are a billion worldwide, one of the most law-abiding, religious, educated, affluent communities in the world.

More and more, Indian television particularly, but also newspapers and magazines, are casting a look on India that is not only very critical (if you open any newspaper nowadays, you can only end up depressed), but which in its very nature is a Western look -- which judges India according to Western standards.

But these Western standards do not necessarily apply to this country, which has a different psyche, different culture and different standards.

Why not judge India according to Indian wisdom, which is much more ancient than Western democracy and philosophy?

More importantly, some Indians are more and more divided. Instead of feeling first Indians, they feel they are first Muslims and then Indians, first Dalits and then Indians, first Christian and then Indians. This is a dangerous trend and it spells the death of the minimum unified nationalistic pride that can take a country forward.

Instead, Indians today take pride in melting abroad, or adopting a 'secular' creed, which basically makes them soul-less and identity-less, however brilliantly they ape the West.

What is it that which India is fast losing as you read this article?

Its culture, firstly.

Entire patches in the northeast are being converted to Christianity. Tribals are told by missionaries that it is sinful to enter a temple, women are asked not to wear bindis, children are taught to look down on their culture as animist or heathen.

Its communal harmony, secondly.

Whatever the shocks of invasions, there was always a certain syncretism in Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim communities. The ordinary Muslim in Kashmir or the Christian in Kerala, even if he thought that his or her god was the only true one, had a certain understanding and acceptance of the age-old Indian culture. Reverence for women, respecting others' festivals and customs, harmony with one's neighbours were hallmark traits.

Today, even the Sikh community feels it wants to separate from its Hindu brothers and Christian and Muslims are encouraged to look down upon Hindus.

As a foreigner who loves India, I feel that this blind copying of the West's ignorant and doubting mind, the aping of whatever is has proved wrong in the West -- wild consumerism, or savage capitalism -- will be a tragedy for India.

And what is India's soul? The knowledge that there is life beyond life, the understanding of the different planes above the mind, the ancient wisdom on reincarnation, karma, maya.

And above all, the acceptance that god manifests himself at different times under different names and that god is one in his infinite diversity.

This knowledge, which once roamed the shores of the world from Egypt to China, is today lost everywhere. Yet it is the knowledge that humanity needs for the 21st century if it does not want to go towards catastrophe as it is now, with the world's two major so-called monotheistic religions still believing that only their god is the true one and that it is their duty to convert 'pagans.'

India must thus achieve its liberalisation and industrialisation, by taking the best of the West, but preserving what is good, pure, wise in her own culture.

On a material level, for instance, there should be a revival of authentic Indian traditional forms, such as ancient medical systems like Ayurveda, or Siddha, instead of the total dependence on Western antibiotics.

And what about Indian yogic sciences? Pranayama, for instance, is the most exacting, precise, mathematical, powerful breathing discipline one can dream of. It is also true of hatha yoga, a 3,500-year-old technique, which has inspired all kind of aerobic, so-called yoga techniques and gymnastic drills around the world.

Meditation is also India's gift to the world. The art of relaxing the mind and cooling the nervous system, using simple methods such as observing the breath, or repeating one's god's name.

If these three disciplines were taught in a secular, scientific manner to all Indian children in school, not only it would unify them in the same knowledge, but it would provide them wonderful tools of intuition, endurance and peace of mind, which they could use all throughout their life.

But what we see today instead in India are IIMs or IITs churning out scores of Western clones good for export -- the greatest cause of the intellectual brain drain of India.

And this will be India's gift to this planet during this century: to restore to the world its true sense, to recharge humanity with the real meaning and spirit of life.

India should become the spiritual leader of the world.

Francois Gautier is the editor-in-chief of La Revue de l'Inde (lesbelleslettres.com) and the author of the Guru of Joy (India Today book Club).

Giving more than zero to the world

Be that as it may, the scientist administrator who loves "science and the affairs of science" and scoffs at those who reverse-engineer, laments the fact that India has given nothing to the world in the 20th century -- no Xerox, no Transistor, no Polaroid.

"In the 21st century, we have to change that," he says. So forward engineering, as opposed to reverse engineering, needs to be undertaken. Risks need to be taken. And failure needs to be accepted. "In science, if you don't fail, you have failed," he says.

So his seven-year-old New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative -- which has 50 projects under its belt -- has a healthy failure rate of 40 per cent. The project, with an annual budget of Rs 50 crore (Rs 500 million) per year, aims at bringing together public institutions and private enterprise. The count today of those working together -- 71 private sector companies and 220 institutions across the country.

Has the risk-taking paid off? "Absolutely," says Dr Yogeswar Rao, who manages the initiative. Twelve projects have been completed and another 10 will be completed by March. There is the new drug "Sudoterb" for the treatment of tuberculosis -- phase I trials are on -- in partnership with Lupin. It has cleared TB in two months in animal trials against the conventional 6-8 months.

Mobilis, a Rs 10,000 personal computer, is also on the cards -- 3,000 sets are getting beta tested at the moment. It does everything -- web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets et al -- apart from video games and high-end computing. But we are hearing of a computing machine at half that price ($100-150) from MIT's Nicholas Negroponte who is the founder of the One Laptop Per Child project?

"We entered this area when Negroponte had not even thought about it," says Mashelkar, "and we are ahead of him. Take my word for it," he says, adding that CSIR has also got its eye on the $100 price mark. The two entities are, in fact, competing for a bid in Brazil to supply low-cost computers.

But there are questions. Why should government money head to a cash-rich company like TCS so that a "biosuite" can be developed which marries biology and software? "I call it seduction money," quips Mashelkar. And it is the government which invests and supports industries around the world, whether it is in aerospace or supercomputing.

"The supercomputer in the US would not have been there if government had not invested in it." CSIR's biology labs could never have managed to make a product on their own. And yes, there are commercial disputes in such public-private partnerships. "But there is nothing that cannot be resolved...by Mashelkar," he says.

Innovative India is young

Innovative India is young

With his "can-do-attitude", Mashelkar is convinced about one thing -- India 's competitive advantage lies in drugs and pharmaceuticals. But we have not delivered a single blockbuster drug so far? "You forget that Innovative India is just one generation old. It is too short a time to judge," he says.

Companies are warming up to innovative research and looking for new drug molecules and new ways to deliver them rather than copying what is available.

Heavy investment is required in research. "There must be real commitment to looking at innovation as something which will provide a win in a competitive market, not just because there are some tax breaks to avail," he says.

So while he lauds Tata's Rs 1 lakh (Rs 100,000) car project -- "I assure you it will have four wheels, not three" -- he is worried about the talent crunch that is looming. Take the booming infotech sector -- the entire country has not produced even 40 PhDs in information and communication technology.