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To trust is to believe despite uncertainty concerning another’s action. Trust is located therefore, in the space between total knowledge and total ignorance. It may be distinguished from ‘faith’ on the one hand, which does not require secure knowledge, and from ‘confidence’ on the other, referring to circumstances in which the probabilities of another behaving in a particular way are well known. India poses particular questions in this regard. First, Indian business suffers from “an endemic lack of credibility”, often thought to have to do with the existence of a business culture characterised by ‘selective trust’ because of the dominance of private, family control and resistance to management accountability. The second focus of the research on which this essay is based concerns the response of Indian business to the new conditions associated with economic reforms and economic globalisation.