Thanks Venatius, for a nice compilation with commentry of Gandhi's philoophy.
Gandhi preferred that machine be kept idle than a man/person. This is
largely interpreted as: he prescribes manual labour or lower mechanization. And
in those days of a large unskilled manpower that India had, it was contemporary.
Lets now think differently.
Compared to OECD countries, Indian capitalism has one major Manpower related
difference: In india, wealth creation is almost entirely out of M (money). That
is,
a. Most Indian entrepreneurs rely on his (father's) money to create
entreprises. In the process they use other Ms: men, machines, materials and
methods (bought from foreign collaborators). Of these, only Man has variable
output values under different situations. Men deployed by these had opportunity
to achieve a low average values. Eg: Birlas, Goenkas, Thapars, Singhanias etc
b. There are few examples (like JRD Tata) who allowed their men to use his
money to achieve higher values: indegenous projects like Sumo, Nano, .
c. There are abyssimally low examples of of Men being invested as the main
capital to create entreprise: Infosys, Biocon etc.
Compared to India, the US shows much lower cases of (a) and much higher cases
of (c).
A large number of Narayanmurthys, Kiran Shaws and Nilekenis languish in jobs,
where their wings of creativity are clipped by the Owner's direction of vision.
Gandhi's emphasis on man could also be interpreted in this percepective as the
words of a world class management guru. But from Nehru to Manmohan have ignored
it.
In Goa it is worse: Huge profits from mines does not help further wealth
creation in the state. It is invested into Bonds, Mutual funds, Equity and Real
Estate.
Rajendra
Venantius J Pinto <[email protected]> wrote:
Seems that Gandhi's concern was to keep businesses happy, or was it only the
Birlas! If he was around and seeing the India of today, its is apropos to
speculate that
he could have had a second or third awakening -- a major one, much on the
lines of people just trying to stay on track.
Gandhi gave his blessing to the abundant wealth of Birla with his teaching on
trusteeship, a concept which asserted the right of the rich to accumulate and
maintain wealth, as long as the wealth was used to benefit society. Gandhi
apparently borrowed the concept of
trusteeship from the writings of the American millionaire, Andrew Carnegie,
who had used trusteeship to promote capitalism over socialism.
He did reject the factory model of industrialization,and rather preferred
that a machine be kept idle than a man/person.
