A booming economy and a galloping sensex have made many join the billionaires’ club. Even as there is a depraved craze about this new found hunger for riches and the rich whom the Generation Next would worship as their role models, we have missed out on the core purpose of business.
Doyens of Harvard Business School where our youngsters aspire to study opine that businesses which gave back to society often performed better, thanks to greater consumer empathy and engagement. They espouse the values of companies that nurture and nourish the community they exist with.
Despite Mukesh Ambani becoming the world’s richest man, companies like Microsoft and Citibank are doing much more for India than most of our swadeshi corporates. More important than cheque book charity, which is aimed, more often than not, at claiming income tax rebates, is the need for the rich to engage in actually setting up systems and processes which will actually empower those living in not just 21st century but 21 different centuries.
While launching a project called “Grand challenges in global health” in 2003, Bill Gates said, “Let’s collaborate horizontally on defining both the problems and the solutions — let’s create value that way—and then the Gates Foundation will invest our money in the solutions we both define”.
Adverts were placed on the Web and elsewhere across the developing and the developed worlds asking scientists to respond to one big question, “What are the biggest problems that, if science attended to them and solved them, could most dramatically change the fate of several billion people trapped in the vicious cycle of infant mortality, low life expectancy and disease?”
The Foundation got about 18000 pages of ideas from the best and the brightest of the world including the Nobel laureates and short-listed fourteen Grand challenges, which included: how to create effective single dose vaccines that can be used soon after birth but do not require refrigeration, how to develop needle-free delivery systems for vaccines, how to better understand which immunological responses provide protective immunity; how to better control insects that transmit agents of disease, how to genetically or chemically incapacitate such insects; how to create immunological methods that can cure chronic infections etc.
The Foundation is now in the process of funding the best of 1600 proposals received within a year, with $250 million cash, knowing full well that pharmaceutical companies would seldom venture in these areas because they are not rich men’s diseases and hence not as profitable as developing an anti-cancer drug.
Given the dilapidated health care systems in poverty stricken areas of the world, the Gates Foundation is trying to stimulate the development of drugs and delivery systems that can be safely administered by ordinary people. Having acknowledged that the most important health care system in the world is a mother, the foundation is mulling over how to get things in her hands that she understands and can afford and use!
Are our corporates listening please?
