Doing Ethical Business

Speaking at the ET Global Business Summit in New Delhi, Union Fince Minister Arun Jaitley said last Saturday, “Ease of doing business was government’s responsibility. There is need to transform from this to industry’s responsibility in the habit of ethical business... Indian business has to learn to do ethical business. Those who deviate from this will face the consequences not only in terms of business and civil law, but the crimil law too will be transformed to allow extreme action against such delinquents.” In doing so, Arun Jaitley very fairly reflected the perceptions of Indian consumers who are the usual victims of the lack of ethics of most Indian manufacturers. Indian manufacturers are a very crafty lot. When they manufacture goods for export, they ensure fairly rigid quality control and fairly strict adherence to size, weight, quantity and other specifications mentioned. They learned to do this after Indian exports faced rejections because of the tendency of Indian manufacturers and exporters to cut corners or cheat wherever possible. It took years to shed the notoriety of being unreliable manufacturers. But they learnt nothing about being honest with their own countrymen. Indian manufacturers continued to give less to their compatriots than they were supposed to. So it is customary for an Indian consumer to get a bedspread that is actually 58”x 88” when he buys something that is claimed to be 60”x 90”.  It is also customary for people to get less weight than what is claimed when one buys packaged food products. There is no sense of shame as far as the manufacturer is concerned, perhaps because our scriptures have not condemned this trend of cheating the consumer strongly enough. The least that our consumers can do is to measure and weigh and write about how manufacturers have cheated them. Nowadays they can even talk to television channels to get the attention of the public.