The ‘Integrity India Campaign’ launched by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and headed by N.R. Narayana Murthy raises some interesting questions and possibilities.

The intention of the campaign is laudable. As India’s economy grows and Indian companies extend their footprint across the globe through dramatic acquisitions across a wide swathe of industries, it is galling for India to have the dubious distinction of being the most corrupt exporting nation in Transparency International’s Bribe Payers’ Index.

For CII to anticipate a trend and latch on to it early is nothing new. Remember how it wrote up the first Corporate Governance Code, when confidence in Indian business was at a real low in 1996. That was when greedy companies (large, small, known and unknown) took advantage of a stock market and realty boom, raised large sums of public money for greenfield projects that languished for the next decade, while the money went into private pockets.

But there is a vast difference between writing a code and holding seminars to discuss it and actually walking that talk. Murthy knows how angry corporate India was when a Sebi-appointed committee headed by him proposed some far-reaching steps to improve corporate governance and independence of the board.

Will the Integrity India Campaign be different? According to the CII, the campaign aims at “creating a national debate, consciousness and positive action to inculcate the values of transparency, accountability and efficiency in economic activity”. That is nothing new. We Indians are good at discussions as is evident at every seminar on good governance or corporate social responsibility. Murthy himself has got the campaign rolling by lambasting corporate and bureaucratic corruption.

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