Travel-Blogue Day 9: The Moral Philosopher

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 26

When Gurcharan Das took early retirement as the CEO of Procter & Gamble India at age 50 in 1995, he traveled around India to get in touch with his country. What he found is that the culture was being transformed. Because of economic reforms and the gradual breaking down of the stifling bureaucracy, “Our minds were being decolonized,” he told me. The result of Das’ travels and revelations was his book, India Unbound, which was published in India in 2000 and the US in 2001, and helped raise awareness worldwide of the new potential of India.

Das is the non-executive chairman of SKS Microfinance, the company I spent yesterday with. He asked me about my impressions of the village women I had seen and met. I contrasted them with women I had met in Bangladesh when I toured villages with Grameen Bank a few days ago. The women in India’s state of Andhra Pradesh, I told him, seemed to be sharper and more aggressive. His explanation: “We’ve had 60 years of democracy in India. Democracy makes people more confident. It makes them speak up without fear.”

Das is a big critic of NGOs. India is crawling with them, yet they have done little to change the conditions underlying poverty. “A lot of NGOs are non-performing. They don’t follow the rules of the for-profit model. It’s about accountability. You can be filled with compassion but not very effective. That’s true of the NGOs in India and the NGOs everywhere,” he says. That’s why he’s a big supporter of the SKS model: It’s a for-profit company whose goals include reducing poverty. “You’re funding entrepreneurs with micro-credit. This is the way to address poverty. You teach a person to fish rather than giving them the fish. They start small and gradually build up their businesses and their confidence. Eventually some of them start hiring employees.”

He’s also troubled by the failure of government in India to deliver basic services such as health care, clean water, and primary education. It’s not just a matter of a shortage of money or sluggish bureaucracy. These services have been politicized, and many of the people who are being paid to deliver them either don’t show up or don’t do their jobs or demand bribes—or all three. So this situation has gotten Das to thinking about good and evil. He studied moral philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard under the famous professor John Rawls. Now he’s writing a book, On the Difficulty of Being Good, which explores the challenges of doing the right thing.

His work as an advisor to SKS certainly lands him in a moral bind. The company has two goals: alleviating poverty and maximizing returns for investors. Those two purposes will inevitably tug against each other. It will take wise men and women to navigate as more and more energy and capital in the poverty business shifts from charity to commerce.

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