To be global, become strong within India first
This is a subject of national interest. Suffice it to say that it has now been recognised at highest levels that our national interest in this field has been harmed. ICAI’s Central Council approved two Reports, first in 2003, repeated eight years later in 2011, on operations of multinational audit firms. ICAI has damaging findings including FEMA, FIPB violations, cross sharing and the infamous “surrogate marketing”. The illegalities, said ICAI, tilt the “level playing field”. Two decades of inaction subverted this unsettling question – do Indianowned firms have a future? Last week found Citizens Whistle blower Forum writing to the Finance Ministry. Inexpedient audit firm rotation imparted a gift: an insurmountable three-year downward spiral to our national interest, striking equivalently at the roots of credibility of its well-educated votaries. The embarrassing monopoly of a handful of foreign brands now zooms to unsurpassed levels in the top 500 companies. The concentration in the tax and consulting arenas is more lethal than in auditing – it is silent, since these are non-regulated entities. Indianowned firms can have a bright future. With some stanchion could we not have accomplished in the last three decades, the vision our PM expressed at the 68th Founding Day of ICAI, of having four global Indian firms out of a Big Eight? Instead the plight recounted in our PM’s disconcerting expression is: “Sadly, there is no Indian firm there”.
Slated to be among the top three countries globally in terms of GDP by 2030, should India gratify foreign powers and never have global Indian firms? This week’s news supplements this design with an Indian firm, probably our 51st, hunkering-down.
The universally appealing idea of a global Indian firm has one prerequisite: become strong within India first. There is another factor than re-setting the “level playing field” through resuscitators, such as change of law requiring mandatory joint audit and resurrection of ‘swadeshi’ in company boards. Let’s patiently re-build our Indian brands by not comparing them at this forsaken juncture with foreignbrands. Foreign companies don’t miss any opportunity in appointing their own? Our mantra is ‘Make-in-India’.