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Friday, February 16, 2018

Holding the mirror on corporate India

Much has been written about how government regulations have shackled private sector growth in India. While it is undoubtedly true that restrictive regulations have constrained private business growth in the aggregate, for a country of India's size this cannot explain the near total absence of world-class companies and brands from India.

Even in the much acclaimed software sector, none of the Indian companies have progressed beyond being outsourced service providers. All this despite enjoying all the textbook requirements for success - cheap supply of skilled manpower, very low taxes, preferential government policies, benefits of exclusive zones or software technology parks, a massive and voracious global market, and the strong tailwinds of recurrent technology disruptions. There are no major commoditised IT solutions nor are these companies at the cutting-edge of work on areas like data science, artificial intelligence, internet of things, cloud computing, blockchains etc.

In terms of research and development (R&D) spending, our IT titans are minnows, with nothing special to show for in the last quarter century of rollicking growth. But the IT sector is no exception in this trend of skimping on R&D.

The recent economic survey holds the mirror on India's very vocal corporate sector and shows how woefully they lag behind others in their share of gross expenditure on R&D.
Several sectors have had multiple opportunities to benefit from protectionist industrial policies. The most classic recent example is of the solar industry. Despite local content restrictions and other forms of protectionism, Indian solar cells industry can supply less than 10% of the annual domestic requirements.

Another example comes from medical devices. The government has showered the industry with several concessions over the years. Nothing of any note has emerged beyond a few copy-cats. The pricing regulations imposed by the National Pharmaceuticals Pricing Authority (NPPA) on diagnostic devices offers yet another opportunity for this industry to generate world leaders in at least some important diagnostic products.

The other example is defence, where the current government has done possibly everything it could have to promote indigenous defence production. The results so far in terms of corporate India seizing the opportunity has been an utter disappointment.

As a comparison, one only needs to look at how Chinese firms have conquered the world in industry after industry by benefiting from their large domestic market and protectionist policies, two factors that Indian companies too enjoy. We can safely assume that even if NPPA holds the line for 10 years (which was for long the case since all these items were strongly regulated for decades), nothing much would have changed in terms of domestic production.

Apart from all this, I have blogged here, here, here, and here about the failure of the country's startup eco-system to generate innovators and innovations which have had a transformational effect on the country's development or on a pervasive development challenge.

But there is one area where our corporates top - in having among the worst corporate ethics! Consider this,
India was ranked the most unethical of 13 major economies in the 2016 Global Business Ethics Survey, behind even Brazil and China. Last year, Ernst and Young’s Asia-Pacific Fraud survey found that unethical practices are rife in India’s business community with 78 per cent of Indian respondents surveyed saying that bribery and corrupt practices occur widely, while 57 per cent said that senior management would ignore the unethical behaviour of employees to attain revenue targets... Foreign investors and companies complain that Indian businessmen don’t understand the concept of good faith in negotiations. Legal agreements are routinely flouted — often in cahoots with the authorities or the court system. Creative accounting is a commonplace hazard, as is illegal diversion of profits by promoters. The non-performing loan crisis in India’s banks is largely due to bare-faced cheating and fraud by crony capitalists with the connivance of pliant bank executives.
And it appears that questionable corporate ethics has not spared even the start-up entrepreneurs

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