Corporate philanthropy, or corporate citizenship, has improved the quality of life of citizens in the East as much as in the West. In fact, in certain respects the East, the so-called Third World, takes precedence over the West in this particular regard. Recently, a news item in Arab News stated that the Savola Group, one of the largest companies in Saudi Arabia, has, under the aegis of its Corporate Social Responsibility Department, signed an agreement with King Abdul Aziz University to launch a program titled “Learning through Community Service.”
Beginning last year with the computer science department, it is now supporting other departments such as linguistics, arts administration, and economics. The program includes extending help to small establishments, new graduates, and others with special needs to impart to them specialized skills to make them independent and productive. Savola is also sponsoring training programs at the Disabled Children’s Association, the Jeddah Institute of Speech and Hearing, and the Ihsar Vision Society. To the picturesquely called Savola Bridges meant for external programs has now been added Savola Pledges for the company’s internal relations with its staff, clients, investors, and suppliers.
Another Saudi corporate giant, Saudi Aramco, has its Community Outreach program, which has been hugely successful in inducing its employees to voluntarily give some of their time and their individual talents and expertise “to give something back to society.” Remarkably, 70 percent of Outreach’s volunteers are women. More than 50 represented nationalities have given their time and effort to fulfill its objectives. One of their priorities is to offer food, money, and education to hundreds of orphans in Alkhobar. What has particularly impressed me, more even than its many philanthropies, is Saudi Aramco’s efforts to spread knowledge, free of charge, through its house magazine, Aramco World. With its deeply researched articles on diverse subjects, its striking illustrations and photographs, and its superb production values, it can be ranked among the world’s finest magazines, and among house organs, the finest. Its subscribers number over 100,000 all over the world, but they are not truly subscribers because they don’t have to pay.
By contrast, big American companies like General Electric, for example, were slower to wrestle with questions of social responsibility, reveals Marc Gunther, senior writer with Fortune magazine, in an article entitled “Money and Morals” in the January-February 2005 issue of SPAN magazine. Much has been written and quite a few books published on GE’s “formidable” CEO, Jack Welch, who brought about the most radical changes in the company, including the dismissal of over 100,000 workers at a time when the company’s market capitalization was $11 million. The point worth noting, though, is that with this counterstroke he was able to increase the capitalization to $450 million! It was, however, Welch’s successor, Jeff R. Immelt, who saw the larger picture and changed the company’s direction from profit to profit with added values. He is quoted by Gunther as declaring: “Good leaders give back. The era we live in belongs to people who believe in themselves, but are focused on the needs of others.”
So, noting the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, Immelt concluded that in these changing times, it wasn’t enough to be a great businessman, one has also to be a good and responsible citizen. As his first act on becoming CEO, and for the first time in GE’s history, Immelt appointed a trusted ally, Bob Corcoran, as the first vice president for Corporate Citizenship. Under Corcoran’s leadership, GE not only gave greater attention to philanthropy, it globalized philanthropy. GE’s most notable act in corporate citizenship was launching an ambitious $20 million project in distant Ghana. GE is also doing its best to tackle the world’s toughest problems — it purchased a water-purification company, solar energy equipment and a wind-using business. GE today operates in more than 100 countries. As a matter of principle it refuses to do business in Myanmar because the government is notorious for its human rights violations. GE continues to be a highly successful undertaking. Immelt also wants it to be held to higher standards of goodness and virtue.
It is possible that Immelt may have been inspired by another great American who, way back in 1889, donated almost the total proceeds of a highly successful business to a wide variety of charities. This was Andrew Carnegie, who put into effect the then revolutionary idea that wealth entails social obligations, which found eloquent expression in his book, Gospel of Wealth. Much before Carnegie, in ancient India, it was the normal practice for chelas (students/disciples) to present their gurus dakshinas (gifts), whose value was never counted. Islam has always laid great emphasis on the quality of compassion. As the Qur’an instructs: “Uprightness is ... to give away from your cherished wealth to your kin, orphans, the needy, the travelers, the beggars, and to ransom a slave.” Great sages and thinkers and sacred texts preached that one’s private property and all that stemmed from it were not meant for the satisfaction of one’s personal needs, but as offerings to God, which meant human welfare.
Seized by the same concept were Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Pandit Kunzru, whose Servants of India Society, founded in 1905, propagates that enough should be kept for one’s personal needs and the rest donated. In 1965 the great leader Jayaprakash Narayan brought together people from different countries to discuss the social responsibility of business. They shared a common belief that wealth shared is wealth ennobled and reiterated the concept of noblesse oblige that all life is a trust and all power carries with it obligations. Wisest and most practical of all was Mahatma Gandhi, Father of the Indian nation. He found no difficulty in reconciling his concept of partnership with the capitalist system. Capitalists, he pleaded, “should be allowed to retain the stewardship of their possessions and use their talents to increase their wealth. We must not underrate the business talent and knowledge which the owning class has acquired through generations of experience and specialization. Do not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.” At the same time he told capitalists: “Understand that your wealth is not your own, it belongs to the poor in the sense that the rich are the trustees of the poor.”
Personal philanthropy, as against corporate, was under British rule exemplified on a grand scale by Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy with the many institutions bearing his name in the city of Bombay. The earliest seed of corporate philanthropy in India was sown by Ardeshir Godrej, pioneer-founder of the Godrej enterprise, when in 1921 he donated a sum of 3 lakh rupees (worth more than 3 crore rupees today) to the Tilak Fund for Harijan Uplift — a gesture that won fulsome praise from Mahatma Gandhi as being the biggest donation he had received for this fund.
Ardeshir’s younger brother Pirojsha, who consolidated the many gains of the former’s inventive genius, believed that a happy worker is a good worker. He provided well-ventilated houses for his workers at highly subsidized rates, extra means of earning to their wives, schooling for their children, medical relief, and other benefits such as holidays with pay, gratuity, bonus, etc that anticipated labor legislation in the country. Tatas, much bigger and more wide-ranging than Godrej, did likewise for their workers. Its founder, Jamsetji, once famously said: “What advances a nation as a country is not to prop up its weakest and most helpless members as to lift up the best and most gifted, so as to make them of the greatest service to their country.” He called this “constructive philanthropy.”
The excellence of their wide range of products from aiding students going abroad for higher studies to researching a cure for leprosy (India has approximately 3.2 million leprosy patients out of a world total of 11 million) has made Tata and Godrej strong brand names. Their even wider range of philanthropies has made them household names. Every basic need, every required improvement, every cause worth espousing has been fulfilled by various trusts like the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, the Pirojsha Godrej Memorial trust and several others, absorbing a quarter of the companies’ profits after paying tax.
There are memorials to their greatness/goodness. The Tatas have Jamshedpur, the country’s real First City, selected as a United Nations Global Contact City. The Godrejs have an industrial garden township — Pirojshanagar at Vikhroli, a recognized tourist attraction in Maharashtra. They have monuments too like the Pirojsha Godrej National Conservation Center in New Delhi, a fitting memorial to the man who cared deeply for conservation. Recently, the Confederation of Indian Industry-Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Center at Madhapur Village near Hyderabad won the coveted Platinum rating from the United States Green Building Council. India is the first country outside the US, and one of only three countries in the world, to have won this award.
Of course Tata and Godrej are not the only ones in India to live up to their social responsibilities. There are also the Birlas, the Ambanis, the Kirloskars, the Bajajs, the Modis, WIPRO, Thermax, and many, many others. It would need an entire book to do justice to their contributions. The point is that Indian industries are as well aware of their social responsibilities as the advanced countries. The many faces of corporate citizenship in India have achieved what globalization has signally failed to do. For ultimately, these faces merge to show up as one, a human face, the face of compassion.
— The writer is a former editor of Filmfare and Screen, and a former chairman of the Film Finance Corporation of India and the National Film Development Corporation of India. His latest book, Counting My Blessings, was published last year by Penguin India. He is currently on a visit to the Eastern Province.
