Voicing concern over strong ‘‘behind-the-scenes’’ manoeuvering by vested interests in the private sector, Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Sons, said it hurts the country’s progress, stops reforms and makes the policies ‘‘toothless and ineffective’’. ‘‘India is suffering from a very strong influence of vested interests, regrettably sometimes this is more often than not from the private sector.Vested interests and political pulls are the two things that today I think, are hurting the country’s progress (and the reforms process),’’ said Tata, who is also chairman of the Investment Commission. ‘‘Because what then happens is the policy gets modified, manipulated, changed so that it either serves vested interests or hurts the people, which eventually makes that policy sort of toothless and ineffective.’’ Tata, who has navigated the group’s rise since 1991 and was instrumental in increasing its turnover eight-fold to Rs 80,000 crore, regretted that ‘‘there is behind the scenes stopping (of) reforms in a spurious manner, because reforms help some, hurt some.’’ ‘‘If you are truly a nationalist,’’ he said, ‘‘it should not matter whether it hurts you so long as it is fair and moves the country forward. But, regrettably, human nature is not that way.’’ Analysing impediments to the reform process, he said, ‘‘What we are doing is a lot of back-stepping and rolling back. What is happening is sometimes the policy is being compromised to an extent where it had no strength or is ineffective.’’ A major shortcoming in the policy was the absence of a holistic view, he said, adding: ‘‘We are just treating things based on sometimes knee-jerk, sometimes short-term views. Sometimes it is worthwhile to look at the whole policy and re-write that policy since things have changed.’’ ‘Policy manipulation’
