Ethics in private and public relationships

Story hook

On a sweltering afternoon in 1944, a tired and ill Mahatma Gandhi was approached by Kasturba's relative who said, "Bapu, please use the office car. It's just half a kilometre." Gandhi refused. "That car belongs to the Congress, not to me. It is for the nation's work." He walked.

Forty years later, in a corner office in Bombay, J.R.D. Tata declined to receive his salary increment because he thought "the profession of trusteeship should mean what it says." The same year, the Tata Group built a hospital where doctors were not allowed to ask a patient's caste before treatment — a private rule, going beyond any public law.

These two men were not paragons of saintliness in some special private sphere — separate from rough public dealings. They were the same person, with the same code, walking through both worlds. "Ethics is not what you do when others are watching," Gandhi wrote, "it is what you do when you are alone." The deepest test of ethics is whether the private you and the public you are recognisably the same person. GS-IV calls this the continuity of character.

Why this matters for UPSC

UPSC has asked direct questions on this in 2014, 2015, 2019, and indirectly in many case studies (the spouse-of-IAS-officer business deal case study format is a perennial). The unit also feeds every conflict of interest question, every nepotism case study, and the Interview's favourite trap: "What if your father asked you to do something against the rules?"