'My belief in socialism started crumbling': How France turned Narayana Murthy into a capitalist

NR Narayana Murthy, founder of one of India’s largest IT companies, Infosys, was an ardent socialist in his youth before he took this one trip to France that turned him away irrevocably from socialism towards compassionate capitalism. Murthy said he was brought up with a staple diet of socialism before he steered towards capitalism. 

The doyen of the Indian IT industry said that when he saw the standard of France, he was put off by socialism. “You know when I went to France or before I went to France, I was a strong socialist. I was the son of a high school teacher. Eight children. Very little to do with. But father was extremely proud of the country, extremely proud of Nehru, extremely proud of all the wonderful things that were happening. He would read to us every day about atomic energy, steel plants, Bhakra Nangal, etc. I was brought up on the staple diet of socialism. For me, everything that the government did was right. But then I went to France in the early 70s and I was in for a surprise. Everything there was prosperous. There were clean roads, I didn’t see any beggars. The trains ran on time. Every supermarket was full of goods, etc. So, then my belief in socialism started slowly crumbling,” he said in a conversation with TV Mohandas Pai in ‘The Record’ podcast. 

Murthy said that he would go to Sorbonne University on Saturdays after office hours and had befriended certain youngsters who were studying economics. There, he said, he would talk and listen to capitalists as well as socialists. He also went to a few other Western European countries.

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 “I came to three major conclusions,” said Murthy, listing his learnings. “One, the only way a country can solve the problem of poverty is through the creation of jobs with good income. Second, it is the responsibility of the country’s government to remove all restrictions to the entrepreneurs to create more and more jobs for the people, to create some wealth for themselves and some wealth for investors and very importantly, tax for the government. It is not the responsibility of the government to create those jobs. The third thing I realised was that it is the responsibility of the government to create a lot of public goods, roads, hospitals, schools, whatever it is, without any corruption,” he explained. 

Murthy revealed that the then travelled and hitchhiked for 11 months and went through Western European nations, Eastern European nations, Israel, Middle East, and Afghanistan. “That journey confirmed my belief in what I had learnt in France and it converted me irrevocably,” he said. 

Narayana Murthy also spoke at length about the 1991 economic reforms in India and said that the entire country should be grateful to Dr Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and P Chidambaram. 

“Pre-1991 days were hell for business people. India was absolutely anti-business,” he told Pai. Murthy elaborated on the kind of reforms that were brought in in 1991. In those days India was three steps behind the latest technology. 1991 brought in fundamental changes in the economy, said Murthy. 

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