Dealing With Corruption

The participants of INSIGHT 2012 came together for an Alumni Meet on 22^nd June 2013 at the Isha Yoga Center. With Sadhguru presiding, the resource leaders included Deepak M Satwalekar, Independent Director, Infosys, and former MD & CEO, HDFC Standard Life Insurance; KV Kamath, Chairman, ICICI Bank, who joined via video conference; ad filmmaker Prahlad Kakar; Vellayan Subbiah, MD, Cholamandalam Investment & Finance; Dilip Cherian, Co-founder, Perfect Relations; Jeby Cherian, Managing Partner, IBM Global Business Services, India & South Asia; and Prof. Shailendra Mehta, IIM, Ahmedabad.

As a part of the INSIGHT Q&A series, this week Sadhguru and Dilip Cherian, Co-founder Perfect Relations, address a major issue for entrepreneurs and businesses in India – corruption.

Participant: Namaskaram Sadhguru and the resource leaders in front. I run a pharmaceutical company and my question is a little bit different from the core operations itself. I wish as leaders and CEOs if we had enough time to focus on business issues but what I’ve seen recently is that lot of our time and energy gets sucked up in people who are trying to get in the way of business. We get different calls from politicians, different political parties asking to make a donation to the upcoming election. I just gave an example of politicians. It could be the local villagers, the pollution control board, the drug control authority. So we deal with many stake holders and it seems like a lot of the time gets wasted in preventing people from becoming obstacles.

Dilip Cherian: If I may just provide a backdrop to what Sadhguru will probably explain, one of the core issues which INSIGHT wanted to tackle from the very beginning was the issue of entrepreneurship in India and in fact over a period of time you hope to tackle this more. Not that there is any one direct answer but entrepreneurship in India suffers from this as a major road block across all industries, all sectors, sadly all sizes, and now most locations. Except for one or two shiny examples of states where you don’t see constant erosion into corruption it’s a nationwide phenomena. So I am sure Sadhguru will take this theme further.

Make Your Voice Heard

Sadhguru: I wish it was a roadblock. You could slow down and again speed up. No, it’s a malice. It’s there everywhere. It’s getting like that in many states across the country. This has to be addressed and all of you who are entrepreneurs who have some means to manifest at least your opinion, I think this is one thing that we must make a major issue in the coming election.

It’s a certain humiliation that to find your basic rights you are required to do these things. As you said you cannot focus on what you really need to do because every day this handling itself takes so much amount of time and energy. I think all of us who are citizens of this nation particularly entrepreneurs have to make a statement: who is that who is going to offer us a clean administration. That’s what we are going for. This must be not just by casting your vote, we must make it loud and clear. Is everything going to change? No. But something could change. Even some change will be a breather because right now for some types of businesses it is truly suffocating. Some businesses are not so mired in these things but for certain types of businesses it’s absolutely suffocating. If you get an infection in your body, if bacteria and virus enter, you can’t just sneeze it out. Slowly you have to weed it out but you need a treatment if it has to go. That treatment is needed. It’s only the people of this nation who can give that treatment.

Editor’s Note: INSIGHT: The DNA of Success - A Leadership program with Ratan Tata, Dr. Ram Charan (Top CEO Coach), GV Prasad (Co Chairman & CEO, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd.) with Sadhguru is going to conducted from Nov 27 - 30, 2014 at the Isha Yoga Center, Coimbatore.

INSIGHT 2014

Visit the website www.ishainsight.org, or contact +91 83000 84888, leadership@ishainsight.org for more details.