Better know, before talking
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S Gurumurthy
First Published : 07 Aug 2009
We have in our country a long but uneven tradition of philanthropy’. Thus
lamented Sonia Gandhi at the function in Delhi to give the Indira Gandhi Prize
to the American philanthropist Bill Gates. That was on July 25. Two days later,
the Wall Street Journal printed, unusually, her whole speech. On July 29, Paul
Beckett, a WSJ columnist, taking his cue from Sonia, mocked Indian businessmen
for not being even remotely close to matching Gates. He pontificated: “India’s
rich, open your wallets”.
Beckett used corporate India to dent the image of India itself, courtesy Sonia.
Had she not spoken the way she did, he would not have written the way he did.
What Sonia did not know — therefore, Beckett, who borrowed from her, could not
— is what differentiates India from the US. American corporates, which almost
exhaust America, are co-extensive with it; they account for over 80 per cent of
its GDP. Bill Clinton had nicknamed the US ‘America Inc’, namely, the US as the
aggregate of its corporates.
US corporate endowments aggregated are highly visible, like their brands. This
is to emphasise their nature; not undermine their worth. The US market cap is
some 40 times the Indian. Corporate India is insignificant in contrast. Some
400 top private Indian companies account for under six per cent of India’s GDP.
This includes all Sensex members.
Sonia is understandably unfamiliar with the practices of traditional India.
Indian charity, widely practised at the lowest unit levels down to every home,
is socio-religious, not secular, in construct. Traditional India has high
charitable propensities and deep philanthropic impulses. Indian religions do
not convert others; their charity is therefore less known. Here are some
examples of charity where the religious power is manifest.
Look at the charity run by Bhagwan Sathya Sai of Puttaparthi. His work for the
poor is unmatched; yet equally unknown. Here are just two illustrations of his
work. Anantapur district in Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh was known for
water scarcity and water salinity and high fluoride levels in drinking water.
Moved by the suffering of the poor, Sai Baba decided to do what the government
could not for 50 long years; provide potable drinking water to the whole of
Anantapur — yes, for the whole district.
He declared in November 1995, “Today it is ‘Raatlaseema’ (rocky region); it
must be transformed into ‘Ratnala Seema’ (land that glitters like diamond)”. It
took just 18 months. The work involved laying some 2,000 kilometres — yes 2,000
km — of water pipeline; building 43 sumps of 1.5 lakh to 25 lakh litres
capacity; constructing 18 balancing reservoirs of three to 10 lakh litres
capacity — where? — on top of hillocks; erecting 270 overhead reservoirs
holding 40,000 to three lakh litres; installing 1,500-plus concrete pre-cast
cisterns of 2,500 litres capacity, each attached with four taps for people to
draw water.
This is how the 9th Planning Commission document describes the initiative. The
Sathya Sai charity ‘has set an unparalleled initiative of implementing on their
own, without any state budgetary support, a massive water supply project with
an expenditure of Rs 3,000 million to benefit 731 scarcity and
fluoride/salinity affected villages and a few towns in Anantapur district in 18
months’. Baba’s trusts repeated this feat in fluoride-affected Medak and
Mehboobnagar districts. They provided water to some 4.5 lakh poor in 179
villages in Medak, and to some 3.5 lakh poor in 141 villages in the next. The
drinking water projects in these districts covered more than 1,000 villages
with some 20 lakh people.
Then, he saw the poor in Chennai struggling for water. He declared on January
19, 2002, “Today I have made a new resolve. Madras is suffering from acute
shortage of drinking water. The rich can buy water. What will the poor do? I
have decided to work towards bringing drinking water to Madras, no matter how
difficult and how costly the task”. His central trust took up the construction
of a 63-km stretch of the 150 km canal in the Telugu Ganga scheme, left
incomplete for want of funds, thus denying water to Chennai. Thanks to Baba,
Krishna water reached Chennai, irrigating some three lakh hectares of
agricultural land on the way. These projects cost over Rs 600 crore.
The Sathya Sai trusts in Puttaparthi and Bengaluru run world-class speciality
hospitals. They have performed some 24,000 cardiac surgeries, 34,000 cardiac
cathertisations, 7,000 neuro surgeries, 40,000 eye surgeries, and 600
orthopaedic surgeries and treated millions more — all free. What is absent in
these two hospitals is a billing department. The bill for these services might
exceed Rs 1,000 crore. Baba’s trusts also run free educational institutions,
cultural centres and music colleges. Secular India generously released a stamp
to note the charity in Anantapur. Compare it with the Indira Gandhi award to
Gates and the encomiums at the cost of India.
Take another religious charity, the Ramakrishna Mission. It runs 197 hospitals
and its health-related work serves 85 lakh people annually, including 25 lakh
in rural areas; 1,186 educational institutions serve 3.4 lakh students
including 1.24 lakh in rural areas.
Take the Swaminarayan movement. Its 14 hospitals serve over six lakh patients
annually; it runs 10 schools, eight colleges, 14 hostels; it has built 55
schools in disaster-hit areas; it aids 20 schools financially; gives 5000
scholarships annually. In Punjab, not a single man, woman or child would have
gone hungry in the last three centuries, thanks to the langar in Gurudwaras
feeding millions every day. Jains run huge charities all over the country. So
do religious Muslims and Christians. Even the freedom movement was sustained by
philanthropy. Lala Lajpat Rai gave all his properties to the movement;
Chittaranjan Das and many others went bankrupt funding the movement. They never
expected any Indira Gandhi Award. That is real philanthropy.
Traditional Indian business communities allocate a fixed share of their
turnover for charity. The mahamai, an informal charity tax among the Nadars in
Tamil Nadu has funded hundreds of the community’s educational institutions. The
Nagarathars in Tamil Nadu too, through their mahamai, run huge charities. The
Marwaris and others do so through the dharmada. Even today this informal system
prevails in non-corporate business in India. So charity is by the community as
a whole, not by individuals. But corporate India is unfortunately neither
Indian nor American.
This is India, about which Sonia is singularly ignorant even after 40 years of
domicile. When she said India has an uneven tradition of philanthropy it only
exposed her ignorance, besides exporting it to the WSJ. The result? The WSJ is
preaching to Indians about charity; the Indian media reports this nonsense
without challenging it.
