Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju’s confessions and ensuing disclosures have had a chilling effect. It

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has frozen the credibility of everything and everyone closely or remotely connected with Raju. Satyam, its board, the regulatory system, the state of Andhra Pradesh, the nation and, indeed, the post-liberalisation won credibility of the corporate world has been momentarily frozen and struggling to get back on track.

All this has undermined another area of the IT company’s engagement, namely, corporate social responsibility (CSR). In these circumstances, it may seem ironical to write about Raju’s initiatives in the area of CSR and philanthropy. Yet, one must for at least two reasons. First, there is the question of what is at stake in Satyam-linked CSR initiatives. Second, a thorny question, is whether CSR and corporate governance can really be understood in isolation from ethics.

First, the question of trapped value in Satyam’s CSR-led initiatives. Two major initiatives, the Emergency Management Research Insti-tute (EMRI) and the Health Management Research Insti-tute (HMRI), were initiated by Raju and are linked to Satyam through the umbilical cord of IT solutions. These are examples of what design and scale can achieve in delivery of minimum health services to the poor.

Both the initiatives are innovative, technology-driven solutions to reach free-of-cost health services to under-served and poor communities in the area. Since the news of the scam broke out, much has been said about the livelihood and skills of about 40,000 employees trapped in Satyam at stake. However, the contribution made by EMRI, HMRI and the Byrraju Foundation is no less, and, in fact, is considerably more staggering in scale.

EMRI, via a 24x7 helpline, delivers daily emergency services to approximately 9,000 under-served and poor through over 1,000 state-of-the-art ambulances. This translates into bringing about three lakh under-served to the closest health destination per month — often at life-saving moments and within a benchmarked time.

HMRI, on the other side, is a standardised health counseling and mobile healthcare and medicine disbursement service, which registers approximately 7,000 beneficiaries a day. It delivers a double advantage. Under-served individual needs of the vulnerable communities are met and, simultaneously, a valuable database is generated for tracking macro trends and epidemics, which helps healthcare management.

Another aspect of trapped value is that both EMRI and HMRI have morphed from being purely private-led health initiatives to public-private partnership. The government supports 95 per cent of the operational cost, while the 5 per cent with EMRI relates to key management costs, providing control over ‘people, process and performance’. This partnership mix brings private efficiency to a public health programme.

The success of these programmes led Satyam to expand them to nine other states, apart from Andhra Pradesh. Four of them after news broke about Raju’s disclosures. If these CSR initiatives bounce back unscathed after the double blow from the financial downturn and the corporate governance scam, it would clearly demonstrate that good systems can

partially survive bad individual influences.

These CSR initiatives also reveal an unusual kind of convergence and co-ordination that public service delivery needs. This includes bringing different stakeholders, doctors and health specialists, police, technical and social service support groups under a public service delivery network.

Reports suggest that investments into EMRI, which faced withdrawal threat after the scam broke out, were back on board for the time being. The Andhra Pradesh government’s willingness to take over both the initiatives is not surprising. The Byrajju Foundation’s connect with over a million people in rural livelihood transformation stands firm, with communities having pledged their support to it even after the scam.

This leads to the question, “Do CSR and corporate governance have anything to do with ethics?” The answer is that ‘it should’, but largely does not.

Take the case of CSR. ‘Ethics’ has carved itself out of the CSR discourse. In fact, even ‘following the law’ is normally not included. Increasingly ‘business models’ of CSR are being followed. This, as the name suggests, are social strategies useful to business, which also happen to deliver ‘goods’ to the stakeholders. Typical in this genre is the social and environmental benchmarking through certification, standards and so on for business advantage.

Another popular business model strategy of CSR relates to augmenting the transformation of incomplete markets (say, rural business) through creating investment and building capacity for producers and so on. The value of these efforts cannot be minimised, but they do tend to sidestep the ethics discourse. Similarly, one can be philanthropic without having ethics, as we have come to learn. There are a plethora of CSR awards. What about ‘Ethics Awards’? Whistleblowers, we know, are often awarded with martyrdom of their jobs or worse.

Ethics is a larger issue than corporate governance. We can never come up with enough corporate governance shields to cover all the vulnerabilities of ethics. Under intense competition, crony capitalism can trigger and aid in penetrating these shields. A core and deeper transformation of many agents and institutions, upward from the family, community, schools, state and so on, is needed. Otherwise, we will soon be back to business as usual, irrespective of whether corporate scams are unearthed or not.