“I have always felt that every senior management person of an Indian corporation has to show self-restraint in his or her compensation and perquisites. He or she has to fight for maintaining a reasonable ratio between the lowest salary and the highest salary in a corporation in a poor country like India… This is necessary if we have to make compassionate capitalism acceptable to a majority of Indians who are poor.”
N.R. Narayan Murthy, founder of Infosys Technologies, slamming the board’s decision to hike the company COO’s annual remuneration by 60-70 percent (The Economic Times, April 3)
“If a man can be beaten to death on a crowded highway in broad daylight on the mere suspicion of ‘cow smuggling’, as happened in Alwar on April 1, how can anyone — an African, a northeasterner, a Dalit, a Muslim, or a person with a different set of beliefs — feel secure?”
Economic & Political Weekly on the rising tide of mob violence being tacitly encouraged by the BJP/RSS and sangh parivar (April 8)
“What is a bigger threat than war, civil unrest or natural disaster? For Indian business there is an obvious answer: government.”
The Economist on the Indian Supreme Court’s order banning alcohol sale within 500 metres of a state or national highway (April 8-14)
“It undermines (an) honest credit culture, it impacts credit discipline, and it plugs incentives for future borrowers to repay. In other words, loan waivers engender moral hazard.”
Urjit Patel, RBI governor, on the newly elected Uttar Pradesh government’s fulfilment of an election promise to waive farmers’ loans aggregating Rs.36,000 crore (India Today, April 24)
“If one talks of developing country agriculture, especially in India, one gets an imagery of a thin, dark-skinned, half-naked farmer using a 17th century instrument called yoke either tied to a couple of bulls or himself.”
Shanthu Shantharam, adjunct professor of biotechnology, University of Maryland on a “global conspiracy” to deny scientific developments from the West to third world countries (Swarajya, April)