The Right Path

How the Premjis of Wipro are showing that majority ownership need not come in the way of good governance

- Harichandan Arakali

It was a sunny winter Saturday morning, the kind people still like Bengaluru for, notwithstanding the devastating loss of trees and water bodies the city has suffered in parallel with its rise as India’s tech capital.

An interesting no-holds-barred exercise was underway at IT services company Wipro’s headquarters: School and college students from as far away as Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala, Goa and Chhattisgarh were quizzing Wipro Chairman Azim Premji. “How can one become like you?” or “Are you happy with all that you’ve done?” and “How can companies pay attention to sustainability in the competitive commercial world?” were some of the questions.

That last question evoked the following response from the 72-year-old billionaire, India’s second richest man: “I think too many issues of sustainability are being deprioritised because of commercial interests, and one has to make commercial interests secondary, behind sensitivity for the environment, which doesn’t always happen.”

It was a session organised as part of the 7th annual Wipro Earthian programme to recognise school and college projects that raise awareness about the environment among local communities. Premji continued: “I think government policy should be directed towards it and there should be proper enforcement of such a policy on an ongoing basis. And it requires pushback from people such as you, because you represent the population.”

Just as management guru Peter Drucker once asserted that there is no such thing as business ethics, but just ethics, Premji’s credo for himself— which boils down to doing the right thing under any given circumstance— is difficult to separate from the values he set down for Wipro decades ago.