Merchants’ Chamber of Commerce and Industry organized a special session on Wednesday with Nobel Laureate, Mr. Jerry White, who is also a senior Ashoka Fellow. Mr. White is a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for peace in 1997. On his first visit to Kolkata, he attended a special session of the MCCI on Ethics and Business.
The session was Presided over by the MCCI president, Mr. Namit Bajoria.
Mr. Bajoria welcoming Mr. White to the Chamber, said, apart from talking business, it was the moral responsibility of the Chamber to work towards the cause of ensuring peace, harmony, and co-existence of humankind. Ethics in business, he said, was like a component of innovation and it has to be seen, how innovation while getting commoditized augured best for human interest. The world wouldn’t have run and the economy wouldn’t have grown if there had been no ethics in business, Bajoria said.
Nobel Laureate Mr. White said, “businesses and governments together sometimes are war machines”. While he had spent ten years in studying nuclear non-proliferation, he had spent another ten years studying destructions from land mines. He said 80-90% of the war victims were civilians and land mines have injured more people than all nuclear and biological wars put together
He said victims of war with a disability should get level playing fields in terms of the dignity of jobs and access to education. Although India had such a legal framework, the law should get its true implementation, White said adding value-centered leadership would guide a business in the right direction. And there should be radical inclusion of war victims in businesses.
India’s diversity, he said, was its strength with united religious initiatives and interfaith networks enabling its growth. “China is hurting itself and the World by making the same everything the same in its businesses.
Shri Prateek Choudhary, MCCI Committee Member, gave the vote of thanks.
