By Shailender Singh
For years, Hyderabadis were given sermons on how hi-tech companies can produce great wealth and Satyam Computer Services was cited as the finest instance of this. We were first made to understand and then to believe that a knowledge society produces wealth, not just computers.
It was all hyped to such an extent that except for computer education all other subjects — social science, natural science, hardware technology courses — began to be abandoned.
Hi-tech was propounded as the solution to everything in life. In the ’90s, if anybody with the so-called “bad influence of Marxism and welfare economics” in Hyderabad dared to say that state control and trade unionism are required in every institution, hi-techwallas would scoff at them. “This fellow does not understand how Satyam would suffer if state controls or Marxist trade unions go to these institutions, while it is busy producing knowledge-based wealth,” they would say.
The proximity of a living example like Satyam in a city you live in, deconstructs the knowledge you acquire through reading the history of industry or of economics.
Development and growth have been defined in altogether unknown terms ever since such hi-tech institutions mushroomed on our horizons.
Satyam’s hi-tech was all around us in Hyderabad as Infosys is all around the people of Bengaluru. The employees who lived in airconditioned houses and travelled in airconditioned cars used to ask a state government staffer or a university lecturer, “What kind of life does a state job give you?”
Hi-tech educationists were also in a hurry. They were not willing to listen to the argument that everything should improve gradually.
Both classical economics and, to an extent, Marxist economics believed in gradualism and change in a phased manner. However, the hi-tech people told us all those theories were outdated. Things change in days, months.
Those who expressed scepticism were told that at the global level Microsoft proved it and in India Satyam and Infosys were proving the same.
Their key argument was that the knowledge society does not need state regulations. From their point of view, the knowledge society was essentially nothing but computer society.
The computer, they said, audits all frauds and keeps everything in order. Transparency is part of its being. But suddenly we find that the computer has allowed a fraud that runs into thousands of crores of rupees. It has enabled fraudsters to show accounts in whatever way they wanted. To sell shares, balancesheets showing profits could be cooked to the tune of thousands of crores.
In Hyderabad, Satyam was a star. A job in Satyam ensured huge dowry for a boy. It also ensured a high lifestyle.
In fact, high-paying jobs changed the lifestyles of people overnight causing many psychological problems. Social classes that were not used to spending much money began to splurge.
This was the period when Satyam chairman B. Ramalinga Raju became a matchless example of everything great. The then chief minister, Mr N. Chandrababu Naidu, was seeking appointments with him, to bask, perhaps, in the aura of his hi-tech knowledge.
This also played a role in prompting Mr Naidu to shift all his focus to hi-tech. He even ensured that Mr Raju shared the dais with Bill Clinton, the former President of United States. This grand alliance produced a fraudulent driving licence for Mr Clinton out of a computer just for fun.
Did not Mr Clinton then and there ask, “How could you do that? If it were done in my country both you and I would have gone to jail.”
It was the master of frauds, Mr Raju, who did that. At that time anything Satyam did was satyam (the truth) and nobody could question it. In fact, till the other day when he was caught red-handed, nobody was allowed to doubt his efficiency and honesty.
What happened in the US in the recent past and what is happening around us now tells us that with all its limitations, state socialism has to come back to infuse morality into the society and to maintain balanced and gradual growth.
Experts of knowledge society, who were arguing that the state should not be seen anywhere around them, are begging it to rescue them now. The Satyam employees, who were treating the state as an inefficient institution that should not interfere with their efficient, honest and transparent functioning, now want the state to protect them.
Similarly, the US companies that have always opposed state intervention are now urging it to bail them out. When the Indian state suggested a reservation policy in the private sector the very same hi-techwallas argued that reservations would not only breed inefficiency but also a fraudulent administration.
The fraudulent accountants of Satyam were not brought in through reservation. No state administrative unit, headed by a director who was brought in by a low mark preferential treatment, has indulged in the kind of fraud that Mr Raju and his team indulged in. Let the state step in to mend their ways.
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