This is a lightly edited transcript of the speech I gave at Columbia University on April 14, 2012. I would like to start with a story. A couple of months ago I was asked by the Gujarat government to take a look at the technology at the Checkposts that they have. They were trying to … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 1
It’s not the people that are the problem; it is the system. What’s missing is governance, and what we need to do to transform India, is to transform governance. We’ve heard a lot about ‘the what’ of transforming India – all good ideas on what needs to get done. In education, we need to get … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 2
The first one is that we need a change of policy. We need to change the policies that got us into this current mess. We need policies which will get us out of there. Bt for that, we need to understand why we got into this mess. In most cases, we need policies which are … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 3
Policy change is not going to happen until we have political change. India needs a new leadership. India needs new politicians who believe in these new objectives — good governance and development. Policy change needs the politicians in India to change. And that will only happen through one way – changing people’s voting behavior. India … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 4
Changing people’s voting behavior requires changing what they know, changing what they are aware of, changing their understanding. What they need to understand is that India is poor not by an act of God but because of poor economic policies which have been followed for the most part, since independence. What we see in India … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 5
What India needs to do is something it hasn’t done in 30 years. It needs to deliver a majority to a single party. It needs to deliver 272 out of 543 seats to one of the national political parties. This is because, right now, what we have in India is where parties of 10-20 members … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 6
2014 is going be different. I’m going to tell you the reasons why it’s going to be different., and why 2014 can really change the future of India. Firstly, urban seats are increasing — there are now about 200 out of the 543 seats in India that can be classified as urban seats where the … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 7
This technology reachable and powered base can make a huge difference in the next elections. There will be about 150-200 million people on the internet in India , there’ll be the same numbers on Facebook. Youtube is likely to be among the top three Indian channels. Technology can be now used to target and get … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 8
To summarise: to transform India, it requires us to persuade this 25%, these 200 million people or a large fraction thereof, that development matters, that good economic policies matter, that poverty can be conquered and our problems can be solved – not between two generations, but between two elections. Some chief ministers in India have … Continue reading Transforming India Speech – Part 9
I spoke on April 14 at Columbia’s India Business Conference. My topic was “Transforming India.” Here is the audio of the 15-minute talk I gave:
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