Business and Professional Ethics

Last week I was in Madurai as a panelist in a Seminar on Business and Professional Ethics. It was organized by the Dept of Management Studies, Fatima College. This timely theme highlighted many facets of business and ethics. Inevitably, it gravitated towards a discussion on Corporate Social Responsibility . What intrigued me was the speakers invariably gave examples from Western countries. While there are many large and even smaller companies in India which has done work at the grassroots level, none of it was presented. It somehow gave the impression that CSR is the exclusive purview of MNCs working in India.

Finally, one speaker stood up and said what is lacking in India is Self Esteem. We tend to be very negative when it comes to our own people and over enthusiastic when it comes to foreigners. Though India needs to catch up on lot of fronts compared to the advanced countries, if we continue to run down our own people, we will not reach anywhere.

My only prayer at the end of the seminar was: "Where the mind is without fear and the head held high...into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my Country Awake!

IT Companies gear up on CSR front

Corporate Social Responsibility is slowly but surely getting its due importance in technology companies scheme of things. A recent article in dataquest, India Chicken Soup for IT, vividly describes several efforts by Indian and MNC IT companies.

The CSR article talks about IT companies partnership with NGOs and their work in the education sector. It is heart warming to note many Indian companies taking the lead and setting the trend in improving quality access to education. MNCs like CISCO, Microsoft and IBM in their own way also have been going it alone to work on various education projects.

While many of these CSR projects are in collaboration with NGOs, IBM is perhaps the only IT MNC that has partnered with Govt. Depts and working on a very large scale "Reinventing Education Project" Check out the Dataquest article for more details.