5.       India needs to create a Challenge Portal.

Check the US challenge.gov portal. It involves putting out some of the challenges that government departments face, with an offer of reward and recognition. It gets people involved in thinking about the problems the nation faces and gets them to work to solve them.

India needs to do something similar. Every government department has some key challenges. They should put them out on a common Challenge.gov.in portal. This will help capture the imagination of Indians. For the first time, we will have a government actually doing something more than random “open houses” to get citizens and experts involved in thinking together about the problems we face, and then coming up with innovative solutions.

This requires government officials and ministers to have a mindset that they are not the experts in every area, and are not blessed with the wisdom to solve every problem – and there are people out there who are smarter than them. If we can get the Challenge contests going, it will be a great step forward. (For starters, Technology Review India listed out a set of Grand Challenges – these could be good starting points.)

Continued tomorrow.