Leading non-resident Indian industrialist and Britain's business ambassador Lord Swraj Paul on Friday underlined the need for a high degree of accountability and maximum transparency in the Indian system to achieve success in the globalised scenario.
"Without a very high degree of accountability we will not succeed especially in financial services where a little bit of scandal can put you behind," he told PTI in an interview.
Paul, who is a member of House of Lords and chairman of Caparo Group Ltd, United Kingdom, said, "We need to make the system more transparent."
"Not just the political system, but the whole economic system, industry and business need to be more transparent and accountable," he added.
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Lord Paul, who is in the city enroute to Sri Lanka, expressed displeasure that in India "some way people still find that they can do wrong things and get away with it."
"Scandals can happen everywhere, but the guilty are being caught and punished faster in other countries as evident from the latest cases like that of Enron," he said.
"It is not a question of democracy accountable to the people. The business as well as private and public companies should be accountable," Lord Paul said.
Lord Paul said India lagged behind countries like China because of "some of our slogans and too long a discussion on protectionism vs globalisation."
"We had the ability, but went in different directions," he said, adding "We should shed slogans like 'please protect us' and convince ourselves that we can protect ourselves."
Lord Paul said: "In fact, we did not anticipate that protectionism is going to be a thing of the past and we discussed free market only when Russia collapsed. We should have anticipated it earlier."
He said there is no need to "condemn ourselves" for the past mistakes and for China being "30 years ahead of us."
"But here is an opportunity to reach a level that India deserves and it has to be counted as a great nation," he said, adding through the success of Indian IT industry, we have proved that we can do things without needing much capital."
He said the West discovered the concept of globalisation only recently whereas we have been talking about "vasudevakudumbakam -- which is nothing but the idea of the whole world as one family since centuries."