Top
MBA colleges in Delhi NCR are fortunate and so are the students who get an
opportunity to build careers in one of the best job markets in Asia. God be
with them. Yet it is a very badly kept secret that India on one hand is an
emerging economy and on the other is a third world nation. At the heart of this
two edged sword that dangles over India and many other emerging economies
across Asia and Africa is poverty. At Ishan Institute of Management &
Technology, the first MBA college in Greater Noida the academicians of the
faculty of business administration have made every possible endeavour to
collect data, analyze it and bring insights on the challenge of poverty and
what business schools can do to eradicate it if not obliterate it completely.
Why Learn About Poverty in Business
Schools?
This
year when Leo won the Oscar for The Revenant, there were audiences across the
world who gave him an ovation. The acceptance speech said it all. The state of
existence of indigenous people, climate change and poverty are related. It is
subversive if not paradoxical to assert that a country with less than 8% of the
world’s population engages in more than 70% of the global consumption and
generated more than 30% of the global pollution and then preaches dictums of
climate change to emerging economies. First, there is a strong argument for the
people living in the rest of the world (third world) to comprehend their
strength and contribution to the global economy. Second, estimates of various
self financed and independent research institutes show that in the exchange of
monetary value between the north and the south, the south exceeds the north by
more than 4 times. There is no way that the south is dependent or should be
dependent on the north. It is the north that is dependent on the south. Third, the
country that has been the lynch pin of trickle-down economics, market
fundamentalism, free trade, foreign direct investments and nuclear
demilitarization has hailed the collapse of alternative economic systems in
arch rival nations. The truth is that with-in the periphery of the free market
model that is worshipped by business schools in the Anglo-American tradition,
16,000 children die every day owing to hunger and hunger related diseases. An
estimate by Philippe Diaz, the critically acclaimed economic rights activist
and film maker asserts that if the United Stated were to slash its military
budget by 4%, it shall be possible to arrange for liquid capital worth
U.S.$250,000,000 and shall be to eliminate more than 50% of absolute poverty in
a single financial year.
These insights are more than enough for aspiring
managers at top MBA colleges in Delhi NCR to understand that managing in the
global economy mandates the end of poverty for the sake of market consumerism,
investor returns and economic growth to sustain. At Ishan Institute, we have
attacked the issue of poverty academically and intellectually from different
directions with different perspectives. Some of the most important insights and
perspectives on poverty that we have incorporated into our academic curriculum
so far are as follows:
The Bottom of the Pyramid Market by
Prof.C.K.Prahalad
There
is a viable business opportunity for blue chip corporations that want to do
business in emerging economies. It is very much possible to create both high
volume and high margin based business models in emerging economies. For global
corporations to do business in emerging economies they must look to solve
problems of the local communities through cost efficient and effective
innovations in product and process development. Low cost housing for the low
income groups, financial inclusion through innovation in online and mobile
banking, credit unions, self help groups, microfinance institutions, low cost
healthcare models like that Narayana Hridayalaya, low cost higher education and
many more such examples exist to point to the possibilities. Late Prof. Prahalad
has put forward the design of such business models brilliantly in the book
Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
Transparency, Equity and
Accountability in Corporate Governance by N.R.Narayana Murthy
Most
emerging economies that are grinding poverty have the unenviable past of being
erstwhile colonies for more than 600 years in many cases. The experience that
they have been through has been harrowing enough for them to have complete
disbelief in corporate capitalism. While it is not necessary for corporate
capitalism to breach and infringe upon the economic and political sovereignty
of nations, the reality is too unfortunate and tragic to be ignored by these
nations that are under conditions of abject poverty. Bolivia for example was
the home to the lion’s share of silver the world had. Venezuela was and
continues to have abundance of crude oil. Ghana, Kenya, Sudan, Angola and
Sub-Saharan Africa were probably the richest in terms of natural resource
presence over the last 6 centuries and yet the expropriation of wealth and the
drain of economic surplus resemble an economic carnage of Himalayan
proportions. For this trust deficit to be reduced, for people’s confidence to
be won and for support from governments on policy initiatives like FDI,
licensing, single window clearance of business projects and liquidity, blue
chip corporations must display complete transparency, equity and
accountability.
Development as Freedom by Amartya
Sen
Development
as freedom by Amartya Sen is more than a book. Recent development in the field
of development economics and search for alternate hypotheses on economic
development in addition to GDP, GNP and National Income are direct outcomes of
the acceptance of development as freedom concept given by Prof. Sen and has
wide implications for business schools and MBA colleges in Greater Noida. At
Ishan Institute we have incorporated a few of the themes and extended tracks of
human development index, gross national happiness and now the optimism index
for corporations to look beyond the financial metrics of doing business. His
works have also found support from Joseph Stiglitz and the UNDP.
Business
need not be any less aggressive in form and content for it to maximize profit
and achieve the bottom line and yet there is the pressing need for
academicians, students, business leaders and blue chip corporations associated
with top MBA colleges in Delhi NCR to appreciate that when more than 70% of the
world population lives on less than U.S. $ 1 a day, there is a scope and
necessity for doing well by doing good to end poverty. Ishan Institute of
Management & Technology, is the first graduate business school of Greater
Noida and the top MBA college in Greatet Noida as on date.
