By Bonnie James
India is very far from where it needs to be, globally acclaimed Indian entrepreneur and philanthropist Azim Premji cautioned an elite gathering of his countrymen yesterday.
“Country after country is stepping ahead,” he pointed out at a reception hosted by Indian Business & Professional Network (IBPN) yesterday evening.
The chairman of $7bn revenue Wipro, an IT, business process outsourcing (BPO) and R&D services organisation with presence in over 50 countries, is on a business visit to Qatar.
Reminding his compatriots that the ‘more we rest on our laurels, the more complacent we become,’ Premji recalled that if India had 70% market share of the BPO business five years ago, it has shrunk to 35% now.
“Countries like Philippines and Poland are coming up real quick in the BPO arena, China is emerging strongly in engineering software, the world is very competitive,” he said while urging that ‘we have to win our success through hard work.’
Highlighting one of the areas that require lot of focus and efforts in India, Premji observed that ‘the size of poverty is nothing to be proud of.’
The founder of Azim Premji Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation - with a vision of significantly contributing to quality primary education for every child, in order to build a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society – also spoke about initiatives in this regard.
The current programmes of the Foundation reach out to over 2.5mn children in more than 20,000 schools across India. Teacher training is a key component.
“Of the 6mn teachers in villages, 1mn never attend to their job and may be three-fourths of the remaining 5mn are trainable,” he said.
Referring to the status of the 600 teacher training institutes, Premji remarked that in many cases these institutes and their teachers are more untrained than teachers they are supposed to train.
The tycoon, who has been travelling for two-and-a-half weeks, visited countries including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Canada, and the US before reaching Qatar yesterday evening.
Speaking earlier, Indian Ambassador Deepa Gopalan Wadhwa commended Premji’s commitment to values and philanthropy as remarkable and stated that he has managed to change the image of India abroad.
She recalled that during her posting in Sweden, the governor of the northernmost province wanted to meet her, because Wipro had bought over a local company and kept jobs instead of shipping jobs outside.
“The future of India really lies in educating our young masses and that is exactly what the Azim Premji Foundation is doing,” she said while expressing a desire to work for the Foundation when she retires.
IBPN general secretary Yasir Nainar gave a presentation on the life of Premji. Raju Buddhiraju from Commercialbank spoke. IBPN president Azim Abbas welcomed. Vishal Chauhan of Commercialbank was the master of ceremony. Renowned artist MF Hussain was also present on the occasion.
Words of inspiration
The first Indian recipient of the Faraday Medal and listed as one of 10 people globally, who have the most ‘power to effect change,’ by Forbes in March 2003, Azim Premji also shared some of his management mantras.
“Believe in a core set of values of which integrity is most important. Fanatical levels of integrity is an asset and not a liability as some people think.”
“There are many people, even in corrupt government departments and countries, who go out of their way to help you,” he said.
“When you work with teams, challenge them, but first challenge yourself. If you can challenge younger people you can create amazing individuals.”
Premji strongly believes that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things and that the key to this is creating highly charged teams.
“If you can constantly challenge people you work with, you get excellent results,” he reminded while urging to go for excellence ‘whatever you do.’
Excellence is not an act, it is a habit, make it a habit, not only for you, but also for people who work with you, he added.
Premji’s words reflected his firm commitment and belief that business organisations have deep social responsibility, and this responsibility must be discharged by conducting ethical and fair business, by active involvement with fundamental societal issues and by building an ecologically sustainable business. |
