Why are the Tatas obsessed with white?

Why are the Tatas obsessed with white ?

Have you seen a leech? It attaches itself painlessly to your body and sucks your blood till it is full and then drops off quietly. Usually, you do not even notice it! The entire process is designed by nature to be painless, so that you do not realize and protest.

That is the closest description I can give of the Tatas. The biggest and fattest leech which has fed on the blood of Oriyas since the last 100 years.

I think this should be the ad line for the steel makers .........…“we loot Orissa and make steel too”.

The elite Tatas and their philanthropy! Which Indian has not heard of the omnipresent group! Seeing the papers and TV full of their social activity ads, I seriously wonder when do they ever get the time to make steel ?

Beating the drum of corporate social responsibility (CSR) when the term was unheard of in India, they managed to deceive us over the last 100 years.

If you folks, can remember, not so long ago, a Tata employee was a prize catch in the marriage market, especially in a poor state like Orissa where people pine for secure salaried jobs. Ofcourse that was in the Mughal era before Reliance, Infosys, Satyam and Essar blazed their path in the corporate firmament !

I know quite a few gentlemen who still revere these bandits as God. They laud the social service done by the Tatas who never mind building a few schools, colleges and hospitals for the poor masses. I would rather die than consider treatment in a Tata funded hospital! Do not wish to surrender my soul to the Devil, Faustian style!

How successfully have they been hoodwinking successive governments of our state since the last 50 years!They have not set up a single steel plant in the state though they have been sitting on prime industrial area at Gopalpur since the last one decade.

The phantom steel plant issue surfaced to silence critics whenever the question of renewal of the lucrative iron ore mines came up. And how do they handle the demanding babus? Cash is a strict no no. Rather they generously appoint their offspring as executives, never mind if they passed out from unknown management institutes.

They have ripped off mountains of iron ore from Orissa at ridiculously low royalty rates. At least,Rs.100,000 crores worth of ore has been looted from our state over the last century. Money which every Oriya has lost!

At the abandoned mines at Gorumahasini in Mayurbhanj,not even a blade of grass grows anymore and locals find it difficult to get even one meal a day.Yet the common Oriya believes them to be the leaders in philanthropy. Why? Because they have make a big fuss about the tit bits they throw to the poor, which is invariably backed by a powerful advertisement campaign.

After the tragic firing at Kalinga nagar where 12 tribals died, the company immediately washed off its hands from the issue saying that it was the government’s job to hand over the land.How convenient!

Do our prestige conscious SPs and Collectors ever stand guard like watchmen to oversee the construction of boundary walls of private companies? But how could they refuse when the powerful Tatas have the Queen and his courtiers in their steely grip?

The group achieved a total group turnover of Rs. 79,912 crores for the year 2004-05. They made a pre tax profit of Rs.11,833 crores. And how much they did spend for charity? The Sir Dorabji Tata Trust disbursed Rs. 44 crores in 2004-05 and the Sir Ratan Trust disbursed around Rs.51 crores. Add to this about another Rs.50 crores odd spent directly by group companies on sponsorships of sports and events and the total does not exceed Rs.145 crores.

This measly amount is approximately 1.22 % of the gross profits ! Actually, the Rs.50 crores handed out as sponsorships for events should be left out, since they get free social advertising for boosting their brand name.I am sure that the total expenditure for Orissa is not more than Rs. 10 to 15 crores. Now that is the real truth of Tata charity once you rip off their façade of benevolence!

Must say, that though most of the Indian banias do not spend even this paltry percentage of their profits on charity. Yet, the sum doled out by the Tatas is a laughable amount, too small by any standards to make them qualify as the messiah of the poor and the needy.

Remember the profit is artificial, derived at the cost of the public exchequer since they grab a non renewable resource like iron ore at ridiculously low rigged prices, helped by the every ready netas and babus of the state. Let Tata Steel pay for iron ore at the market price of Rs.2,850 per tonne instead of getting it at the rate of Rs.26 per tonne as royalty and you can imagine what will happen to their share prices!

They usually paint their office buildings an immaculate white and dress up their liveried peons, drivers and attendants in spotless white uniforms.Why this obsession with white? I think it is a self delusion move to hide their stained pathway to success!

However, no amount of white washing can hide the blood stains of the dead tribals of Kalinga nagar which are clearly visible to the entire world.


P.S.: Kalinga Sandha wishes to gratefully acknowledge the dope sent by "Kick the Tatas" for this post