SOON after Warren Buffett visits India, comes an announcement of a Rs 1,540-crore pledge towards charity by GMR Group chairman G R Rao. Call this the Buffett effect. When the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, one the richest men in the world, asks billionaires, or just millionaires, to open their wallets, they do so. Americans have a saying: “Put your money where your mouth is,” and Buffet certainly has. In 2006, he pledged most of his fortune to charity. The primary recipient of his largesse was the Gates Foundation. He also gave to the four charitable trusts created by his family—the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Susan A. Buffett Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation. Along with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Buffet has led the trend of billionaires donating a significant part of their wealth to charity.
In India, too, there have been some notable donations recently, like the Wipro chairman Azim Premji who gave over Rs 8,000 crore, and HCL founder Shiv Nadar who gave Rs 580 crore for education. Notable instances of corporate social responsibility include the Infosys Foundation and the Rs 500-crore initiative by Reliance Industries. Traditionally, industrial houses like the Tata, the Godrej and the Birlas built hospitals and educational institutions. Overall, however, India lags behind nations like the US and the UK, which give 2.2 per cent and 1.3 per cent of their GDP for charity. The Indian figure comes to a miserly 0.6 per cent.
Many of those who give do not merely give away their money; they monitor its use and even set up institutions that would help to make the change that they want to make. We must realise that it is better to leave our children a better society than to merely leave them with wealth. People clever enough to make billions have done so; it’s high time we did so, too!
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