Ten Point Social Charter

Following is an excerpt from a landmark speech by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the Annual Summit of the Confederation of Indian Industry in New Delhi

In a modern, democratic society, business must realise its wider social responsibility. The time has come for the better-off sections of our society to understand the need to make our growth process more inclusive? to eschew conspicuous consumption, to save more and waste less, to care for those who are less privileged, to be role models of probity, moderation and charity. Indian industry must, therefore, rise to the challenge of making our growth processes both efficient and inclusive. If those who are better off do not act in a more socially responsible manner, our growth process may be at risk, our polity may become anarchic and our society may get further divided. I invite corporate India to be a partner in making ours a more humane and just society. We need a new Partnership for Inclusive Growth based on what I describe as a Ten Point Social Charter.

First: have healthy respect for your workers and invest in their welfare. Unless workers feel they are cared for at work, we can never evolve a national consensus in favour of much-needed more flexible labour laws aimed at ensuring that our firms remain globally competitive.

Two: corporate social responsibility must not be defined by tax planning strategies alone. Rather, it should be defined within the framework of a corporate philosophy which factors the needs of the community and the regions in which a corporate entity functions. This is part of our cultural heritage. Mahatma Gandhi called it trusteeship.

Three: industry must be proactive in offering employment to the less privileged, at all levels of the job ladder. The representation companies give to SC/STs, OBCs, minorities and women in their workforce must increase. I am, therefore, encouraged by CII's Report on Affirmative Action. I commend your example, and hope it shall be widely emulated. You must show sensitivity to those who are physically less-abled, in providing a workplace conducive to their employment. You must employ retired members of our gallant Armed Forces.

Four: resist excessive remuneration to promoters and senior executives and discourage conspicuous consumption. In a country with extreme poverty, industry needs to be moderate in its emolument levels. Rising income and wealth inequalities can lead to social unrest. The electronic media carries the lifestyles of the rich and famous into every village and every slum. Media often highlights the vulgar display of their wealth. Ostentatious expenditure on weddings and other family events, for example, plants resentment in the minds of the have-nots.

Five: invest in people and in their skills. Offer scholarships to promising young people. High rates of growth mean nothing for those who are unable to find employment. We must invest in skill-building and education to make our youth employable. Here too, I appreciate the CII's initiative in upgrading ITIs. This is a very good beginning, as I said, but there is more to be done.

Six: desist from non-competitive behaviour. The operation of cartels by groups of companies to keep prices high must end. It is unacceptable to obstruct the forces of competition from having freer play. Even profit maximisation should be within the bounds of decency and greed. The private sector should show some self-restraint in this regard.

Seven: invest in environment-friendly technologies. India's growth must be enhanced and, yet, our ecology must be safeguarded for our future generations. Our track record in resource use is good, but must improve further. As a country of a billion plus people, with a scarcity of natural resources on a per capita basis, we cannot afford the wasteful lifestyles of the Western world. Conspicuous consumption must be reduced not just because it is socially undesirable at our level of development, but also because it is environmentally unsustainable.

Eight: promote enterprise and innovation, within your firms and outside. If our industry has to make the leap to the next stage of development, it must be far more innovative and enterprising. The success story of the last two decades has been the emergence of a large number of first-generation enterprises. As industry aims to master increasingly complex technologies and becomes organisationally more complex, it must try to maintain its competitive edge by investing in R&D and innovation and promotion of enterprise.

Nine: fight corruption at all levels. The cancer of corruption is eating into the vitals of our body politic. For every recipient of a bribe there is a benefactor and beneficiary. Corruption need not be the grease that oils the wheels of progress. There are many successful companies today that have refused to yield to this temptation. I commend them, and I urge others to follow.

Ten: promote socially responsible media and finance socially responsible advertising. Through your advertisement budgets and your investments in media, you can encourage socially responsible media to grow and flourish. You can promote socially relevant messages and causes.

This is not an exhaustive list. You may wish to add to it, and adopt your own Social Charter for inclusive growth. The objective would be to encourage a culture of caring, sharing and belonging. We must end forever the debate whether our country's march of progress has benefited India and not Bharat. India is Bharat.

A comment on the Prime Minister's speech by UCLA Professor Thomas Plate

New Delhi - Serious social tension roils on in hotpots here and there and all across the globe. Gaps between poor and rich rarely seem to shrink and in most places continue to enlarge. The fairest assessment of economic and informational globalization (the greatest pretender as an income gap-narrower since orthodox Marxism) would suggest it may be adding more fuel to the fire than anything else. In India, especially, a blind man can see what is happening. The poor are to be found almost everywhere you go, even and especially in this mammoth nation's capital city. Fortunately, Manmohan Singh has anything but deficient eyesight. Educated at Punjab and Oxford Universities in economics, he senses some kind of gathering storm - a kind of global political warming in the sociological rather than the meteorological sense.

Singh, India's deeply intellectual prime minister, offered an extraordinary speech Thursday before an enormously well-fed audience of Indian industrialists that in another era might have been dismissed as maudlin Marxism. But Singh is no more a Marxist than Alan Greenspan, the former U.S. Federal Reserve system chairman, who at about the some time went public with an expression of fears about China's overheated economy that sent shivers down the spine of world markets. In his speech, Singh, a deeply serious man with a cerebral IQ probably twice that of most national leaders, expressed concern not about the possible crash of financial and equity markets but about the possible crash of national political legitimacies. Speaking of his own India in particular, Singh offered the kind of penetrating and wide-ranging critique of capitalism that other national leaders should take to heart. The turban-topped economist asked his audience (and by implication the world) whether self-satisfaction about unprecedented wealth, as is being enjoyed in India itself these days, is wholly justified in the oppressive presence of diminished equality. All but begging the business community to show more social responsibility by investing in and caring for workers as much as profits, he proposed that companies put a lid on excessive and odious compensation and benefits for top executives, especially when it was obvious that masses of people are near-starving in the streets.

The exhibition of a philosophical dimension at the top of Indian politics is not considered grandiose puffery or vulgar grandstanding, but rather as an inheritance and indeed responsibility derived from the grand tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, the George Washington of India, and Jawaharlal Nehru who is arguably the nation's Thomas Jefferson and its first prime minister. We do have enough for our needs, Gandhi would often say, but not enough for our greed. His disciple Nehru would often echo the thought, once putting the issue to Indian youth this way: "What shall it profit you to get your empty degrees and your mess of pottage if the millions starve.?" It was into this rich tradition of large question-asking that Singh last week stepped. But he did not jump off the cliff into the utter madness of rank socialist prescriptions. Nehru had tried almost all of them, from centralized planning to state capitalism, and almost every one of them failed. In his life he raised the right questions, but in his career he came up with the wrong answers. But the social and humanitarian norms underlying Nehru's philosophy remain deeply embedded in India's soil. It may be glorious to get rich but not if that process breeds more poor. If excessive clumsy government intervention stymies economic growth without reducing inequality, then who does possess the tools to ameliorate the problem? It is none other than those who have the wealth; and so it is the rich who must help the poor - far more than ever.

Singh carefully sought to pull out one example to make his point accessible to more than professional economists and hard-driven businessmen. He chose one of the true Indian cultural untouchables: the lavishly extravagant wedding so prevalent among the wealthy. "Such vulgarity insults the poverty of the less privileged," he told the businessmen. "We cannot afford the wasteful lifestyles of the western world. Conspicuous consumption must be reduced." The prime minister is suggesting that a philosophy of systematically caring for those who have less is probably the best way to make sure that all of us will continue to have more. India Inc., as the nation sometimes refers to itself these days, is currently having a banner year - bouncing around at the 9% or so growth level. This puts it on China's level and is remarkable all by itself. But the prime minister, like any very good CEO, worries about trouble that might be just around the corner even as the present bountiful seems unending. Wealth can trigger social and political unrest at the same time as it produces numbers over which economists and business men will salivate. The paradox of economic wealth is that it can impoverish societies by depriving them of legitimacy - the necessary social capital required for stability, continuity and progress. Singh's speech may be the most important one given by a major national leader so far this year.

Full-time UCLA adjunct professor Tom Plate, author of "Confessions of an American Media Man," is traveling in South Asia. © Tom Plate, 2007. Distributed by the UCLA Media Center.

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