Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy revealed that in his younger days, he was a socialist.
During an interaction with former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai for the podcast ‘The Record’, by 3one4 Capital, Murthy said, “I was the son of a high school teacher. Eight children. Very little to do with. But father was extremely proud of the country, Nehru, of all the wonderful things that were happening.”
He said he was bought up “in the staple diet of socialism, and that for him everything that the government did was right. “But then I went to France in the early 70s. I was in for a surprise. Everything was prosperous. There was clean roads, I didn't see any beggars. The trains ran on time. Every supermarket was full of goods. So, then my belief in socialism started slowly crumbling.”
He said in France, he made friends with students studying economics and would listen to people subscribing to socialism and those in favour of capitalism. “I went to a few other Western European countries that were developed, and at the end, I came to three major conclusions. One: the only way a country can solve the problem of poverty is through creation of jobs with good income. Second: it is the responsibility of the country's government to remove all restrictions to 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.”
Murthy pointed out that it is not the responsibility of the government to create jobs.
“The third thing that I realised was that it is the responsibility of the government to create a lot of public goods—roads, hospitals, schools—without any corruption. These were the three fundamental principles.”
He said he extensively travelled 11 months to various countries including those that were under the influence of communism and also to the Arab countries. “So, that journey confirmed my belief in what I had learned in France and it converted me irrevocably.”