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I write this with an enormous amount of pain. Last year, MindTree Consulting,
an organization I co-founded, added 1,000 new people to its work force. Of
these, 70% were people with previous work experience. The bad news: close to 80
of these new entrants, almost 12% of the new lateral recruits, were asked to
leave within sixty days of coming on board-on grounds of faking employment
details. They failed the verification of their past employment.
Just imagine the pain caused to the system, and the loss of face in front of
international customers, not to talk about the financial losses incurred! It
happened because people do not understand the gravity or ugliness of forging
personal information. How can we place our Intellectual Property and our
customers' Intellectual Property in the hands of such people?
It occurs to me that there is a growing social scourge out there that needs
to be addressed as much as there is a failure in the educational system that is
producing engineers who think nothing of taking recourse to such measures. I do
not buy the theory that it is so because we are an unemployment ridden country.
Anyone who has done his or her engineering course with reasonable diligence can
get a good job. Numbers are testimony to this fact.
The software industry created a million jobs in the last thirty years and in
the next 5 years alone, we need a million more people. That is more than the
educational system can produce. So, if armed with reasonable competence,
employment is just not a problem, and people do not have to attempt cheating the
system in the name of unemployment.
It is not about faking employment information alone. A fresh engineer
recruited from a reputed college went on sick leave. In reality he was to
prepare for his entrance test for a Master's program. In our organization, any
person is entitled to unlimited sick leave because we care for employee health.
In this case, the young man furnished a false medical certificate. Son of school
teachers, when I asked him to explain his conduct, he said, “I did not realize
it was a wrong thing to do”. This young man is in the top 1% of the planet in
terms of education; he also has one of the best paid jobs. How can such a person
not know that forging a medical certificate is a wrong thing to do? Have we come
down to such levels that we have to run ethics classes on what is right and what
is wrong? If the system is producing skilled people without foundational
understanding of right and wrong, we certainly have a disaster on our hands.
| Almost 12%
of the lateral recruits were asked to leave within 60 days |
India's 300 million strong middle class that produces the maximum number of
white-collar work force in this country and holds the key to the future of
India, has decided to abandon its personal value system.
Every day, they see politics denuded of all values, they see big businessmen
evade taxes and treat organizational wealth as their own, they see religious
leaders fail, and they see their icons in the world of sports and cinema nurture
and benefit from connections to the underworld. Every day, these are people who
have to bribe their way for a ration card, a driving license, a house tax
assessment and a train ticket.
So, they have reached a state where they perceive nothing patently wrong in
securing a false medical certificate or submitting an expenditure report with
forged documents. Yet, are any of these acts defensible? Are they backed by dire
needs or poor justifications?
People who submit a fake leave travel assistance voucher to save 30% income
tax would not die of hunger if they chose not to. They do not take recourse to
such measures because otherwise, their children would starve. That is why I
maintain, abandoned values merely have justifications, they are never backed up
by “needs”. A lot of people play victims to justify their actions. I do not
buy into that mould of thinking. If someone has been robbed once or has been
abused as a child, it does not justify becoming a robber or an abuser. As human
beings, we are gifted with reasoning capability so that we do not abandon our
responsibility to think on our own. If having sometimes been at the receiving
end justifies embracing the path of the wrong, it would destroy the entire
system. What, then, about 300 million Indians below the poverty line, who are
always at the wrong end of the stick? What if they decided to subscribe to the
view that the end justifies the means?
| For the
first time in the modern history of Indian civilization, we are seen as
capable, intelligent people who can set a global standard.... and we
cannot afford a reputation of being dishonest |
We have worked really hard, unimaginably hard, to create the IT industry that
we see out of India of today. It has given India new found respectability in the
comity of nations. We are no longer seen as a nation of sadhus, serpents and
beggars. When I used to travel overseas in the early 80s, the assumption at an
immigration counter was, if Indian, the person was a taxi driver and a potential
illegal immigrant. Today, even if an Indian is a taxi driver and a potential
illegal immigrant, the assumption is that the person is a software engineer. For
the first time in the modern history of Indian civilization, we are seen as
capable, intelligent people who can set a global standard.
However, capability and intelligence are not enough to become world-class. If
in addition, we build the reputation of being dishonest people, we cannot become
to the world of software, what the Japanese have become to the world of
automobiles. Honesty, at a personal and at an organizational level, is a
pre-requisite for gaining the world's respect. Honesty is just not optional.
At the end of the day, we are here to run a business. We will do all there is
in our powers to protect the respectability we have built for ourselves in a
globally competitive marketplace. We cannot, beyond a point, engage in a debate
on ethics. In any case, on ethics, there should be no debate. We, being an
“argumentative nation” love to endlessly debate every issue till it has been
beaten to death. As people who have to run their businesses, we cannot take on
the reformist agenda to cleanse the entire system. But, one thing we are clear
about: if people would like to work for us, they would have to make up their
mind on what they stand for.
When an entire industry stands up to protest the scourge in unison, as you
are seeing happen in this special edition Dataquest, it is a strong statement
being made. I hope that parents and teachers get this message as much as the
potential employees do. The intended outcome is really in the best interest of
the individual because it assures him of a simple thing: this industry will not
ask the employee to do something against his or her conscience, it will apply
the same standards to all people-including those at the helms of the
organizations themselves, and it will stand up to scrutiny each time it is
required to do so.
So, the next time you apply for a job in the IT industry or advise someone
who intends to do so, be notified that irrespective of the social system and its
standards of governance, a different set of inviolable rules apply here. We do
not intend to change that. We do not want India to fail in the eyes of the
world.
Subroto Bagchi is co-founder and
chief operating officer at MindTree Consulting
mail@dqindia.com Page(s) 1
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