That’s Chandrashekar Hariharan’s view.

If business takes arrogant, belligerent and aggressive positions in the face of sensitivities involving local social dynamics and enormous potential ecological damage, it will be at the peril of government, industry and finally the people.

There is a despairing parable here of how industry and governments will self-destruct if they continued to be callous toward what they offer, or don’t, to people as livelihood and employment. Livelihood restores dignity and is harder to create; employment is the easier road with infrastructure that begets money but strips people of dignity.

So what can a Tata do to offer more than the symbolic gesture of a school and a hospital as all such businesses have done in the past?

The post makes some very relevant points, but chooses also to ignore certain key facts. For instance, he says:

We have had 50 years of an era dominated by industry in which the right to make a rupee at whatever cost is rarely challenged.

He doesn’t wish to remember the license permit raj, I guess. He also says:

How do we ensure that a Tata or any business/ industrial house does not devise and apply plans and visions without reckoning with the complex social and ecological systems against which they are pitted, every time they go out and pick up large tracts of land and lay them waste with machinery and shop floor workers? (italics mine).

Go out and pick up large tracts of land? Where? Does he know of any State in India that has comprehensive land records and simple land related laws?

But those are minor issues- the post is definitely very readable for the broad truths it seeks to probe.

[Thanks Rama, for the tip].