Business Ethics: The case of Manjunath Shanmugham

Manjunath Shamugham(27) was an IIM Lucknow alumni and an employee of the Indian Oil Corporation. He was killed in Lakhimpur Khiri on 19^th November 2005. He was on a drive preventing the adulteration of petrol in Uttar Pradesh.

The murder of Manjunath Shamugham or Machaan as he was popularly known in his friend circles provokes a serious introspection on our society where the anyone who tries to meddle with the system and become a threat for the “dadas” of the society who can afford to bend the law as and when they require is eliminated. Pre independence India had land lords and kings who exploited common people for their benefits. Post independence the country became democratic and the the landlords and influential lot slowly transformed themselves as businessmen who do not work on the classical theory but exploit their influence in the government and the loopholes in the system to generate huge profits. A nexus exists between politicians and these goons, and anyone who tries to raise his voice is either bought at the right price by them or murdered.

Oil is the lifeline of our economy and hence the people who distribute oil exert incredible control in their geographical domain. We have two powerful groups in the country. One has created economic power through knowledge, skill and enterprise and the other commands the political system and subverts the enforcement agency to prolong their control over the shrinking domain. Clearly the power today is shifting from the latter to the former and the latter cant take it. We the educated youth of the country represent the new order and posing a serious threat to the old order. Lets face this that we are the future of this country and we will fight to replace the old order. Incidents like Machaan should not dampen our spirits and neither should we compromise our ethics and values.

GDrive from Google

The launch of Google GDrive is going to take cloud computing to a new level. It would be serving as an online hard disk on which you can store any data and will be accessible from anywhere in the world. Only an internet connection is required by a user to view his data. Already we are using a service close to this in the way of picasa, google docs and other such services where our data is stored online, but its highly specific. GDrive is going to end that and an unlimited amount of data storage on the network would be possible. This Hard Drive will also auto sync. your files with the files with the files on your computer and update the changed ones. The expected launch date is sometime this year.

Google is already working on convincing the people about the benefits of cloud computing in which the information is stored on the web rather than your hard drive. Another advantage which Google already has is the wide range of services it offers. Users generally will prefer to access service of a single provider which will have integration with other services. For example, I use Picasa, Gmail, blogger, adsense, google docs and logging in just one tab can open all other services in other tabs without asking for username and password. Also there are benefits of interoperability.
But there are downsides to this also. This means that the world will be trusting Google with large amount of personal data and it might breach that trust. There are already some allegations floating on Gmail scanning private mail accounts to generate targeted advertisements.