Voters want basic need, not doles, says Rahul Bajaj

Hyderabad: Noted industrialist Rahul Bajaj has opined that voters want basic needs like bijli, sadak and paani rather than doles as is evident in the elections held in state after state.

“It started in MP and has even impacted Bihar, Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand. If any reassertion of this trend is needed it was given emphatically in last month's elections, especially in UP,” the chairman of the Bajaj Group said, speaking at the Graduation Day of the Indian School of Business held in its campus in Gachibowli on Friday.

He said that the mandate of the 2014 general election was for growth and development rather than narrow caste or communal considerations. An aspirational India, urbanisation and re-engagement of the middle classes with politics is the reason for this trend, he felt.

Mr Bajaj said that the per capita income in India is low compared to Singapore, South Korea and China, although all of them were on the same level in the 1970s. This is due to India pursuing a misdirected socialist pattern of industrialisation, especially between 1970 and 1990.

“We wasted our resources on the public sector and stymied the private sector. We developed a language of rights, not responsibilities and created a huge burden of distortions and subsidies in the economy,” he said.

Mr Bajaj had a word of advice for politicians and businessmen: “Politicians should realise the damage done by the socialist claptrap and essentially dismantle the old system. Businessmen need to be ethical. No large business can be successfully run without an ethical underpinning."

The heads of some of the world's biggest companies are Indians, such as Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Sunder Pichai at Google, A.S. Banga at Mastercard, Indra Nooyi at Pepsico. They are the real leaders and the country needs thousands of such outstanding leaders, Mr Bajaj felt.

Though we have some achievements to our credit, we still have a long way to go, especially things we need to get right, be it growth, infrastructure, employment, income levels, good governance, health service, education etc, he cautioned.

Adi Godrej, chairman, ISB Board, and Dean Rajendra Srivastava lauded the graduating students and called upon them to emerge as good leaders in the future.

Some 898 students in the Post Graduate Programme  class of 2017 and 61 students in the PGP MAX Class of 2016 were among those who were conferred degrees.