Very few governments in the world have larger budgets than some big companies. Given the vibrant and vital role it plays today, it is worth looking at the purpose of business. In other words, how business people should go about in creating or using their wealth.
Business should not only make money through lawful means, but also use at least a part of the profits for the benefit of society.
Business leaders all over the world are genuinely getting worked up as to how they can come up with enduring solutions for this malady.
In the US, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have diverted large parts of their personal fortunes to a charitable foundation, which is funding several worthwhile causes. The Tata Foundation in India, created by J.N. Tata, is one of the oldest corporate endowments in the world. More recently, corporate barons in the IT industry, N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys, Azim Premji of Wipro, and Shiv Nadar of HCL are in the forefront in helping society’s causes.
March against Greed
All this seems to be not enough, as the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement in the USA indicates. This movement, which began mid- September in New York city, is against corporate greed or insensitivity of business towards the majority. People marched past wealthy homes shouting “tax the rich.” Newspapers report that there are over a hundred such similar, but loosely affiliated, protests around the country and that it is spreading to Europe, too.
Why are people so much agitated? They feel that government policies seem to have benefited only the one per cent people at the top. A newly released study using government tax data showed that between 1993 and 2008, the top one per cent of families captured 52 per cent of total income gains.
The scenario is not much different in India. Only recently
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