The Times: “One of India’s top technology bosses has attacked the growing tendency towards conspicuous consumption among his country’s business elite, saying that some of the excesses were repugnant in a nation of such poverty.
Azim Premji, the billionaire philanthropist and chairman of Wipro, the IT services group, said that practices such as flying in American bands for weddings at $1 million a time were damaging in India, where official statistics last year suggested that 360 million people were living in the depths of poverty.
His words come as Delhi considers imposing higher taxes on the super-rich as it tries to close a yawning budget gap.
The country’s ultra-wealthy should be devoting more of their earnings to philanthropy, Mr Premji said. He declined to be drawn on whether he thought the elite should be subject to higher taxes, emphasising instead the importance of giving away wealth voluntarily. The 67-year-old is one of Asia’s leading philanthropists and in 2001 founded the Azim Premji Foundation, an educational charity to which he has handed billions of dollars.
Mr Premji said: “In India the very rich are demonstrating too much conspicuous wealth in terms of lifestyle. That I think has not been the culture of India in terms of the previous rich, [who] always had very moderate, regulated lifestyles. That is getting a lot of visibility. If you go for parties and you go for weddings and in a country of our poverty some of those make you sick.”
India’s economy has slowed sharply, with growth of 5.5 per cent forecast for this year, down from expansion of over 8 per cent early in the decade. Mr Premji said that his country’s boom had been hyped in the past and that its image had been damaged recently by the economic slowdown and policy indecision.
Mr Premji, ranked as India’s third-wealthiest person by Forbes, warned that unemployment in his country could turn into a “complete disaster” if growth did not accelerate sharply.”
via The party has to stop, technology tycoon tells India’s mega rich | The Times.
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