So as 2009 nears, with possibly the largest baggage of gloom quotient seen in several decades across countries, India can take heart that its chief success story for the past two decades, the IT sector, will not come unstuck. Not at least from the Satyam episode.

Yet it could have easily been otherwise. When the Satyam board met on December 16 to take the decision to use $1.6 billion to buy a 51 per cent stake in Maytas Infrastructure and 100 per cent in Maytas Properties, the two firms run by Satyam Chairman Ramalinga Raju’s family members, there was a clear sense the reputation of the Indian sector would take a body blow. Subsequent developments like the decision by the World Bank to impose an eight-year ban on the company from accessing any software business with it have only deepened the impression that the reputation of the sector from India was at stake. There is a reason for this. Abroad, the reference to the Indian IT is always as a group. At the annual brand awards in Taiwan last year, the world’s largest computer hardware manufacturing country, I noticed very frequent references to India. But there too the speakers, including ministers and leaders of companies like Acer, Asus or BenQ, referred to the big four as a common group. So an association by default among the investors was quite possible. This is pertinent in the present economic condition, where the travails of any leading company in any sector can inevitably scar other companies in the same space.

... contd.