India Turns 63: Reasons to Celebrate?

18 Aug 2010 – Shankar Venkateswaran

It was at midnight of August 14, 1947 that India became free from almost 350 years of foreign rule. It was on that day that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, made what is to me one of the most eloquent speeches of the 20th century. He laid out a coherent vision for India when he said “The service of India means, the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity”.

India is a long, long way from fulfilling Nehru’s vision. We as a country still suffer from all the four ills that he spoke of. We are still home to the largest concentration of the world’s poor and undernourished children and our literacy levels continue to be abysmally low. And we are a long way from fulfilling what I believe is the most fundamental element of that vision – equality of opportunity.

But I think there is much that India can be proud of. India’s independence can claim to be the tipping point that ended colonial rule all over the world, not by the gun but through peaceful, non-violent, Gandhian means. It inspired fighters of many of the other freedoms of the 20th century, from Martin Luther King to Nelson Mandela. And when I recently visited McLeodgunj in northern India, the residence of the Dalai Lama, I was delighted to see banners acknowledging the role India has played for the last 50 years in accommodating the Tibetan Government in Exile.

Corporate India too has come a long way. The great industrial families of the colonial era who supported India’s independent movement continue to thrive. Gandhi was often a guest of the Birlas, a group that divided its businesses within the family but continues to thrive. The Tatas are perhaps the best-known of the Indian corporate houses and they continue to be the epitome of value-based businesses, and SustainAbility is proud to count them as clients. The Bajajs and the Shri Ram groups continue to remain relevant. And there has been the rise of the new post-independence conglomerates like Reliance, ICICI Bank and of course the information technology giants Infosys and Wipro. The old and the new coexist in a manner that is so quintessentially Indian.

Independence Day is also an occasion to remember one of Gandhi’s legacies – the idea of Trusteeship – where he espoused that anyone wealthy is entitled to an honourable livelihood but the rest of the wealth belongs to the community and is held in trust. This is the bedrock of corporate responsibility as it is practiced in India and no better day than August 15 for Corporate India to redeem that pledge of trusteeship so that India makes its tryst with destiny.