Infosys’ Narayana Murthy(NRN) recently has told “IT industry needs to pay higher taxes and does not need Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) extension any more”.    This is the reason behind this article now.

Well, I had seen many companies following some illegal and unethical practices during their start-up stage.  To ‘grow’, it was absolutely necessary for such start-up companies to adhere to ‘normal practices’ due to the current political system in the country.    I’m not suggesting here to be illegal.  But practically it is very difficult to be 100% legal in the current scenario. For example, people from top IT companies travel on Business visa to work in US because of the complexities involved in getting work permit.  If they don’t send their team on business visa, they won’t get further revenue for their offshore center.

While I was working in a MNC 13 years back, we used to ‘photocopy’ books from the office library.  After few years, once it became ‘affordable’ for the company (this is the perception I got, may be wrong), they formulated a rule that no photocopying of books were allowed. 

With the ‘legal’ aspect removed in the above example, NRN’s statement looks similar to me now.  Infosys has grown to a great extent that they can afford to pay huge taxes.  But think about small and medium companies that wish to become ‘another Infosys’.   How can they afford such huge taxes?  Shouldn’t they also enjoy similar tax benefits which Infosys enjoyed for more than 25 years in India?

What I feel is that there should be some ‘tax slab’ for each company.  For the first slab, there must be lesser tax or nil tax.  Then it should increase gradually like the individual income tax.  If NRN meant that statement this way, it would be really great.  I wish he meant that way because I’ve great respect for him and his team.  I learned about ‘ethics’ only from his company while I was working there.  Also, no one should comment that, ‘You can be legal and ethical when it is affordable’.

My cousin who is learning ‘Ethics’ in her B.Tech degree had a different view point about killing rats / mice to test new medicines for the sake of humans.  As per her, it is unethical to kill such creatures for our sake.

During the discussion over phone I told her that even though it is legal to do research in other developed countries after getting a degree from a government institute, it is unethical to do so because the degree was almost given free of cost by the government using the tax-payers money and the student is obliged to return some favor to the tax payer (not through money, but through Intellectual Property to the country).

Her argument was that the country doesn’t have proper infrastructure to support research scholars and only developed countries will allow such scholars to do research easily.  Here she had to save even a pencil in the lab.  If that is the case, she was wondering what her focus would be on – research or pencil?

I gave her an example:  “Assume that your father has an IT Research company which trains people for 3 months getting only 10% of the training fees from the student and paying remaining 90% from it’s pocket. Also there is another IT Research company which does similar training but charging 100% of the fee from the student.

After getting 3 months training from your father’s company, if a trainee joins the other rich IT Research company citing the reason that it has more facilities to do research, they pay well, here in your company they have a limit for email storage and there they get unlimited email storage (whether I’ll worry about my research or email storage?), etc, what would you say?”

She told that she had exams the next day and she had to prepare.  Did I hurt her?  Because after getting her degree from a number one government college, she is planning to do research in a developed country.