Given Gandhi's penchant to strike at the root of the problem, and to take a holistic overview of everything, one can imagine that the solutions would have been incisive, and long-standing. He would have said: don't do anything you can not take responsibility for, and consider yourself only a small part of this earth – not vice versa.

Community waste disposal mechanisms, company buy-backs of discarded products and a ‘polluter pays' principle would have been the options thought of. The pesticides issue might just have met with a satyagraha. With a total boycott-no Coca Cola Inc, Pepsico, or the threat of withdrawal of US FDIs from India would stand the collective might of a billion consumers.

Thinking of these Gandhi-like solutions, it is natural that corporate India and management trainees should feel wary of anointing Gandhi as their hero. Had Gandhi been around, he might just have struck right at the heart of the corporate juggernaut, asking them to rethink their approach to modern-day problems.

Gandhi, the ecological yogi would easily have made the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development redundant. His ashrams were microcosms of sustainable living. He and his people needed no landfill sites or dumping grounds for waste disposal. Everything was recycled and what could not be recycled was not used. The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility is right up Gandhi's path of on the ground involvement with the local and the immediate.

The charkha was not just a tool of opposing imported cloth, it was a way of spinning a yarn that strengthened self-sustenance – something that rural India was in need of then, but now as A Annamalai of Chennai says “young people may not be able to relate to a dhoti-clad old Gandhi with his charkha, but tell them now he was a millionaire, London-returned barrister (with earnings around 5000 pounds a year – with each pound worth seven grams of gold-thirty five crores a year), who threw away everything to fight for justice and equality, and they begin at once to appreciate him”.

“For activists”, says Aruna Roy, Gandhi is “irrevocably and absolutely relevant, especially in bringing ethical responsibility into public life, bringing a moral position into the economic debate; and his position against communalism, or the equality of all religions.”

Every word and action of Gandhi was steeped in an inherently insightful view of what worked for India and what did not.

Fifty-eight years after Gandhi, things have not changed much.

The consumer movement in India too, it seems, is in need of a satyagraha. Protesting, and not letting go of the truth, is the only weapon that consumers have to raise their voices, getting redress, and actually establishing an above-board system of information disclosure.