When Greed Becomes the Norm: How the Sly Triumph of Self-Interest Is Hollowing Out India from Within
Greed has arrived slowly in the bloodstream of our society and now it has come to be accepted as common sense. It has previously been rebranded many times as ambition, as hustle or even as growth. It is rarely named but it is signalled in the towers that cast shadows over ration lines, in the malls that shimmer next to neighbourhoods without drains, in the policy documents that speak the language of targets but never of tired bodies. Greed is now a system, and those who refuse to play along are called impractical.
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| Representational Image Source: VinayMutha1212 on X |
But what makes this greed so dangerous is not that it is individual. Greed, after all, is part of human impulse but it should not be institutional. That it flows downward from those in power and is silently mimicked by those below is the devastating reality of India today.
When the state itself begins to mirror the logic of exploitation, when public service becomes a platform for personal gain, then something far deeper than policy is lost. What is lost is moral legitimacy.
It is not difficult to trace the rot. Look at the potholes that never close. The pipelines that never reach. The tenders that never finish. The food that never arrives. Somewhere, someone profits. Somewhere, someone looks away. But more dangerously, somewhere, everyone begins to accept it.
This began as an electoral logic but it has now become a morally accepted reality. To ask for accountability in this climate is seen as naive. To demand public ethics is branded as obstruction. And to refuse participation in this grand game of acquisition is to risk invisibility.
We are no longer just tolerating greed. We are incentivising it. Celebrating it. Designing our institutions around it. But this is not who we were.
Indian civilisation did not lack ambition but it demanded that ambition be tethered to ethics. In our epics, the king was not celebrated for his conquests alone but also for the hunger he alleviated, for the justice he upheld and for the hope he offered to those in need. The highest moral category was restraint. The renouncer was revered because he proved that power could be resisted. Even when not renounced, power had to be justified through rajdharma, and through lokasangraha.
We have forgotten these words. Or worse, we have emptied them of their meaning.
Today, we are measuring greatness by GDP but we are comfortably overlooking how many children eat before they learn. The moral barometer has shifted drastically. Ethical corruption is now a skill that has been sharpened, taught and even admired.
समस्या केवल भ्रष्टाचार नहीं, समाज में जड़ें फैलाती लालच की वो लत भी है जो भारतीय शासन की जवाबदेही निगल गई है।#TINA pic.twitter.com/Hh6f4GncEi
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) January 20, 2026
Greed has many forms. The kind that takes from the poor is crude. But the kind that takes in their name is worse. It performs compassion, announces it loudly, and then quietly removes the supports that once held millions in dignity.
We now see its symptoms daily and we call them “governance failures” as if the system merely stumbled. But what if these are not failures, but features? What if the system is not broken, but working exactly as intended to benefit a few, shield a few more, and forget all the rest?
What happens to a country where privilege becomes policy?
In such a country, the death of a young man in a pit of water is a mirror. He was not invisible. He just did not matter. His death did not offend the system because the system had long ceased to care. To those in charge, he was collateral in a game where profit is maximised, and grief is privatised.
What dies first in such a republic is not the economy or even the institutions. What dies first is trust, the belief that the public good is still a shared goal. That leaders lead, not loot. That systems serve, not sell. That governance is still about people, not about transactions.
But all is not lost. The antidote to greed is not guilt. It is karuna, that old civilisational force which reminds us that we are not separate from those we ignore. That to live well is not merely to rise, but, as I have written elsewhere, to lift. That ethics is a practice. That restraint is wisdom.
We must begin to name greed for what it is. Greed is a political philosophy that hollows out nations even as it fattens bank accounts. We must stop mistaking opportunism for greatness and unethical ambition for excellence. And we must remember that any society which normalises excesses while tolerating exclusion is simply decaying in slow motion.
In Indian thought, the greatest sin is lobha, which means the hunger that consumes all else. The stories warn us that a king driven by greed brings ruin. A society driven by greed loses its soul. Perhaps we are already there.
Or perhaps not if we can find the courage to pause, to see, to ask: What kind of republic survives when its most vulnerable are no longer protected but priced out? The answer will come from memory and the willingness to choose differently because we are not a a nation that is measured by its billionaires. We are measured by how many still believe that fairness is possible, and how long they are willing to wait before they walk away.