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Journalism of Courage
Anyone travelling on India8217;s highways cannot have missed the large number of trucks lying overturned or collapsed by the roadside, or slowing down traffic by crawling at under 20 kmph. In a majority of cases, this has three explanations 8212; the truck is not road-worthy, is grossly overloaded or the driver is drunk. There are clear rules to prevent each of these violations, but they are all flouted for a price. A truck manufacturer who wants to remain unnamed conducted a private study to find out how much money changes hands to legalise overloading of trucks that endanger people8217;s lives. It came up with a whopping figure of Rs 2,000 crore paid annually to police officials across the country in order to condone overloading. To put it in perspective, this is equal to the entire Securities Transaction Tax STT that the finance minister will hope to collect in a raging bull market. The large-scale loot remains undetected because the money paid per truck is fairly low. Ironically, instead of tackling this daily highway robbery, the finance minister was focussed on exempting precisely this group from service tax and surcharge. Was it because they were already taxed informally?
Loot matrix
Dangerous effects
The loot has even more dangerous consequences. Although all overloaded trucks that ply on Indian highways are insured, insurance companies would technically be well within their rights to deny payment. This starts another round of palm greasing to ensure that the police help to suppress true loads in order to claim insurance. The nexus between the police and truckers also has a macabre element because the police are generally pre-disposed to side with truckers when they are involved in accidents with private vehicles unless the victims invoke the right connections. Clearly, corporate India including large public sector companies, which complains incessantly about bad infrastructure and corruption, needs to clean up its own house. Once companies insist on the use of good quality trucks and no overloading, the loot will be dramatically reduced. The rest of the market is small, fragmented and cannot engender massive organised corruption.
Women of ICICI
In one stroke, an eminent jury of corporate biggies has debased the achievements of half-a-dozen top executives in India8217;s financial world by lumping them together for a joint award. The 8216;Women of ICICI8217; is indeed how this group is usually described by the male-dominated financial sector usually in the context of their aggressive and no-holds barred competitiveness and with more than a hint of the pejorative. Yet, the companies they head in the ICICI Group have come from behind to become the market leaders in their respective segments such as insurance and domestic private equity. Why would this achievement be dismissed in a joint award? Why not stick to rewarding those that were individually worthy of recognition, especially when there is already a separate category for recognising women8217;s achievement? Women CEOs are still relatively scarce and their presence on the boards of companies is abysmal. That is why a joint award is more ridiculous. The root of this attitude is easily traced. In all the companies headed by the jury members, there are token women on the board of directors or at the senior-most management levels. The jury did have a woman with a formidable reputation, but her corporate position was inherited. Many professional women told me that the award only underlines how difficult it remains for women to receive recognition without reservation or break into male-dominated corporate boards. If anything, they say, the recognition should have gone to ICICI Bank8217;s chief, K.V. Kamath, who seems to have forgotten to install a glass ceiling to keep women out of the bank8217;s top floor. The 8216;women8217; could have waited until the jury was mature enough to recognise individual achievement.
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