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Hear the White Tiger growl

Hear the White Tiger growl

Narain D Batra | May 6, 2012, 06.10AM IST 

From the Sunday Times of India

News media often report as to how in the midst of a growing economy, hundreds of thousands of children in India remain malnourished. Images of emaciated children in slums are heart wrenching, more so when juxtaposed to high-tower gated communities in Gurgaon and other cities.

When you see a child standing on a garbage dump looking for something retrievable, competing with dogs, cranes and vultures, you wonder where the storied economic growth has been going. With food and oil prices going up, the government sounds ingenuous when it trumpets gross domestic product without making sure that the benefits of economic growth are distributed equitably.

Even if one accepts the Planning Commission's recently released poverty metrics that 29.8% of India's 1.21 billion people live below the poverty line, it still means about 360 million people presently live in poverty, a shockingly high number that includes-let's not forget- millions of children of rural farm workers, city casual workers, adivasis, dalits and Muslims. Neither welfare programs, nor a quotas system will be totally effective for poverty reduction on a sustainable basis even when 8-9 % economic growth is regained. How many five-year plans will it take to lift these invisible people above the officially declared poverty survival level? The government alone cannot fight poverty-partly because it is incompetent; but more so because it lacks sympathetic imagination.

Corporate India has been growing at a phenomenal rate since the liberalization of economy and must contribute its might toward poverty reduction . With economic power comes wider social responsibility and corporate India cannot keep itself aloof from the travails of the common people.

Corporate giants cannot afford to be content feeding only their shareholders' bellies, especially when most global corporations in the US and Europe have accepted that their social responsibility goes beyond profitmaking. Today hardly anyone pays heed to what Chicago economist Milton Friedman erroneously argued in 1970: "The social responsibility of business is to its profits." Democratic marketplace capitalism is the last best hope of India but it cannot survive on greed.

A few years ago, H Lee Scott Jr, former chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores, said, "People's expectations of us-and of corporations in general changed.... It is clear that today people look at Wal-Mart as a solution. And we want to be seen that way. We want to act that way." With more than $421 billion revenue in 2011 and two million employees worldwide, Wal-Mart has earned notoriety for buying cheap wherever it can; nonetheless, it boasts of always selling at low prices. A few years ago, the retailer was perceived as one of the worst global exploiters . But today with its avowed mission of protecting the environment and an affordable $4 prescription drug plan, its image has improved along with its profits.

That's how corporate India should be adjudged-albeit making global mergers-and-acquisitions of mega steel mills or bringing Jaguar/Land Rover to India and thus fulfilling the fantasy of the elite about India becoming a superpower is not a bad idea at all. Corporate India will flourish more by sharing the burden of poverty. Sustainable growth, affordable healthcare and poverty reduction are the chief concerns of India, which corporate leadership too must accept. There is fortune to be made at the base of the pyramid, the late management guru CK Prahalad used to say. I see million-fold brainpower awaiting development.

Corporate social responsibility is a form of business-to-people savoir-faire , social adeptness to win the hearts and minds of the people. Some corporations use their social responsibility activities as a means of building social capital, which comes handy when they are hit with crises.

According to an Oxford Said School of Business report, corporate social responsibility"penetration in India is relatively high with over 80 percent corporations administering some kind of corporate social responsibility program." But unfortunately these scattershot goodwill philanthropic efforts have no visible impact on the invisible people.

Corporate India must develop new business models that enable companies to join hands with local communities and civil society in creating opportunities for inclusive, sustainable growth- growth that generates jobs and enriches human capital.

Civil society can spawn transformative changes by focusing on the poverty-reduction activities of Indian companies. Constant information flows and the software to manage them have increased the ability of civil society to uncover corruption and inequities in decision-making by governments as well as corporations, and identify left-behind disadvantaged groups. Smart use of IT by civil society could impact corporate governance and the politics of economic inclusion.

As political and economic power devolves, India's everyman with his video cellphone will watch corporate India hungrily for social justice. Somewhere, there prowls Arvind Adiga's ferocious beast, The White Tiger. Does corporate India hear the growl? I do.

The writer teaches communication and corporate diplomacy at Norwich University, US