Manmohan Singh really, yes, really, really cares for the poor
Just read this on line BusinessWeek report:
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh challenged business leaders Thursday to ensure the poor benefit from India's economic boom, and to shun the West's "wasteful lifestyles" of greed and conspicuous consumption.
"Such vulgarity insults the poverty of the less privileged," Singh said at the annual conference of the Confederation of Indian Industry, a leading business group.
He promised to continue fostering a business-friendly environment, but said businesses that have benefited from the boom must do more to improve conditions for ordinary people. Nearly 40 percent of the 1.1 billion people in India live on less than $1 a day.
"We cannot afford the wasteful lifestyles of the Western world," Singh said. "It is socially wasteful and it plants seeds of resentment in the minds of the have-nots."
Economic growth has surged since India changed from a closed, heavily regulated socialist economy. Its gross domestic product -- the total value of goods and services products in the country -- has grown by more than 8 percent annually in the past four years, fueled by an outsourcing and technology boom.
A new class of incredibly wealthy Indians can now afford luxurious foreign vacations, high-end fashions and imported cars, and spend huge amounts on weddings.
Singh -- who as India's finance minister in the early 1990s was widely credited with setting off its economic transformation -- decried "ostentatious expenditures," and said rising unchecked inequality could lead to social, environmental and economic problems if left unchecked.
He urged executives to resist giving themselves and their colleagues large salaries, and accused "cartels of groups of companies" of conspiring to keep commodity prices high.
"Even profit maximization should be within the bounds of decency," he said.
"This is not an imported Western management notion," he said. "It is part of our cultural heritage," referring to Mohandas Gandhi's belief that the wealthy are obliged to provide for the poor.
Wonderful that they've dusted off Gandhi-ji and brought him back nto the political dialogue. They must be planning for early national elections!