Price of corporate responsibility

Price of corporate responsibility

The Hindu Business Line

SOME peculiar and entirely unworthy rewards await anyone living up to one's sense of corporate social responsibility in India, as Mr Narayana Murthy, Chief Mentor and founder of Infosys Technologies, must realise by now. He must occasionally rue the day he went out to help the Bangalore international airport project find a way out of its tangled web of politics and finance.

Yet, one is tempted to say that his recent and much publicised run-in with Mr Deve Gowda is just another episode in a new serial. The episode also shows the shape of things to come, and will not end anytime soon if he is dedicated to pursuing acts of generosity and willing service in the interests of the public good in his post-Infosys phase.

The situation is reminiscent of another confrontation with the Union minister for HRD in the previous central government, on the issue of the fees charged by the management institute of which Mr Murthy was Chairman of the Board of Governors.

There, again, the support of all right-thinking persons, students and potential employers included, was in his favour; everyone being of one mind in wanting to keep the prestigious business school away from increased control and subsidy by the Central government. Another similarity was that the professor turned minister took recourse to personal aspersions on Mr Murthy's competence to chair the board of an educational institution. One could, however, hardly ask the minister how well teaching college physics prepared him to run a ministry!

Whether Mr Murthy eventually withdraws his resignation from the new international airport project for Bangalore or not, this unsavoury incident and such irate and petulant reactions ought to teach enthusiasts among corporate leaders a salutary lesson. It underlines the sad truth that giving one's time and energies unstintingly and in an honorary capacity is a thankless job.

Wanting to give back some of what one has earned, out of a sense of loyalty and duty, is likely to give anyone a lot of grief in a world driven by self-seeking, "what's-in-it-for-me culture".

In this instance, the allegations thrown at him are so garbled and confused that one wonders what the former Infosys CEO's guilt really was.

Was it the suggestion that urban governance must also be left to independent bodies? Or did it have to do with the employment generation record of the company that Mr Murthy led?

Or the area of land Infosys asked for? Or the fact that among the many things Infosys might build in the proposed 845 acres is a facility to accommodate the number of foreign visitors who can now find rooms only at either exorbitant cost or great difficulty, given the city's collapsing infrastructure?

The employment creation record of Infosys, in comparison with others, is something one can easily refute with facts. Seasoned bureaucrats would say, used as they are to the vagaries of political leaders on a daily basis, that one must expect this kind of reaction and take it in one's stride.

The leftist, sociologist intellectual might see this confrontation as a much-needed correction in perspectives on globalisation, on behalf of the have-nots, and the majority non-metropolitan population of Karnataka.

Yet managers must not give up trying. The future of several initiatives taken by the post-liberalisation governments can only succeed with the best of public/private sector co-operation. It is inevitable that if any wider sharing of power, which is the last thing that holders of power want, is to be implemented the old school political leaders should see it as for the benefit of the community and not a come-down for themselves.