NDA Harms Indian IT Industry

Before you make any other meaning out of the headline (the BJP supporters might call me a Congress or UPA stooge), let me make myself clear that I do not mean the NDA consisting of BJP and its political allies. Instead, what I mean by NDA is non-disclosure agreement, a phrase journalists like us are confronted with irritating regularity in our interactions with vendors (and now the malaise is spreading even to channel partners).

Whenever myself or my colleagues interact with vendors, ask for information on revenues or any other numbers or about newer client acquisitions or new partners, the standard reply is "we cannot name them, you understand because of NDA". No, I simply do not understand. Rather I feel by blocking information this way they are doing a disservice to media as well as to their own businesses.

I know the origin of this paranoia was with the US companies. There are stringent SEC norms to safeguard against speculatory stock market malpractices and therefore American companies operating in India are tight-lipped to share any such info with the media. Gradually that tendency has passed on to Indian companies and is now prevalent amongst both listed and unlisted companies and even some channel partners.

I can still understand about numbers (revenues or bottomline numbers), but what really irritates me is the unwillingness to name clients or partners under this NDA garb. How would naming a small client or partner in India impact stock market manipulations in US bourses? And why would Indian companies too adopt a similar practice? That I simply cannot understand. That too when names of clients are always available from informal sources (or ‘anonymous leads' in journalistic paradigms). So what is the harm in the info coming officially, from the horse's mouth, so as to say.

Another entity that makes matters worse is the PR who will act as if any simple information shared with the media is the deepest state secret coming out of the deepest vaults of the CIA. In fact, PRs by withholding any and every information creates more problems for the company-if the media is unable to highlight any of its achievement (new clients and partners), ultimately the company gradually goes away from the limelight. Which journalist wants to feature or cover highly sanitized information sans any useful or interesting angle?

I will give an example of an industry veteran who has really grown the businesses of three large US companies in India. When I used to go to him few years earlier for the Dataquest Top 20, we would indulge in inane chats with highly sanitized info being presented as long as the PR person was inside. Then he would ask the PR person to go out on some errand and in her absence suddenly start rattling out names and numbers and other interesting info. In this case, this might have been with the tacit approval of the PR person (the attitude being ‘I will take a dip but not get wet'), but it shows the general intransigent attitude of the PR persons.

Increasingly, I see channel partners too falling into the trap. I have no problem with partners appointing PRs (as that might help in more effective information dissemination amongst media) but if it starts creating a problem in terms of blocking critical information, it is the partners themselves who will not be able to portray themselves better to the outside world.

It is time that vendors and partners use the NDA excuse more judiciously. What do you think about this?

(rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in)