Chennai: Lord Swraj Paul has underlined the need for a very high degree of accountability and maximum transparency in the whole 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," the noted British non-resident Indian (NRI) business magnate said in an interview.

Lord Swraj Paul, who is a member of House of Lords and chairman of Caparo Group Ltd, UK, said we need to make out whole system more transparent adding, "Not just the political system but the whole economic system, industry and business need to be more transparent and accountable."

Lord Paul, who is currently in Chennai en route to Sri Lanka regretted that in India "some way people still find that you 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," he said, adding, "The business as well as private and public companies should be accountable."

Lord Paul said India lagged behind countries like China because "of some of our slogans and too long a discussion on protectionism versus 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".

"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," he said adding "we should have anticipated it earlier".

He said there was 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 has to be counted as a great nation," he said, adding that through the success of Indian IT industry we have already 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".

Stressing that India needed a big step to catch up with countries like China, Lord Paul said, "We have the ability and manpower to achieve it."

However, we have to work harder and work with integrity because integrity is most important to establish credibility in the globalised scenario, he said adding that above all, the whole system should be made more transparent.

Refering to President A P J Abdul Kalam's vision of India becoming a developed nation by 2020, he said I hope it would happen much before that.

Asked whether it was IT that would be driving India to march ahead, he said it was not IT alone, which would drive India's growth. "In fact Indians could excel in everything including manufacturing and financial services; there is no profession which is beyond our ability to do better," he added.

However, Lord Paul wanted the Indian industry to focus more on quality and cost of production.

Lord Paul was of the view that the diversity of India was its strength. Refering to a coalition being in power at the centre, he said there was nothing wrong in having coalition Governments, adding that there were more coalition Governments in the world than single party Governments across the world.