Government a mere spectator, not a driver: Murthy

Information technology doyen N R Narayana Murthy, chairman emeritus of Infosys Technologies, has expressed anguish that India's image had taken a beating due to the lack of governance.

Narayana Murthy said in an interview with Morgan Stanley Research released on Monday that that based on his interactions with global chief executives, he could see that India's image had suffered internationally in the past three to four months.

On the same day, Wipro Ltd chairman Azim Premji, also a senior IT leader, had said separately that the government was ''working without a leader'', and this was hurting the economy badly. (See: Government is headless, says Azim Premji)

Murthy said the country had not introduced many reforms between 2004 (when the United Progressive Alliance first came to power) and 2011. "There was huge expectation. There was a lot of confidence that India would indeed do whatever was necessary because the person who was the face of economic reforms in 1991 is our current prime minister. In the opinion of foreign well-wishers of India, we have reached our nadir since 1991," he said.

Murthy said that if the country was to achieve a growth rate of 8-9 per cent, it would need to focus strongly on building up infrastructure. This would need investments of $1-1.5 trillion. "Such a large pool of capital cannot come from India alone. So we need participation from outside, and for the foreigners to come to India, we have to be seen as a proactive, investor-friendly, and stable governance model.

''This is where the government should not send the kind of signals that it has recently sent by introducing tax laws on a retrospective basis. It does not matter what the intentions are. Nobody can understand intentions; people can only read the laws and then act," he said.