India Today Conclave: Q&A With Mukesh Ambani & Raghuram Rajan

I totally share his view that the centerpiece of the priorities must be the form of education and it must be a form of agriculture if a high growth rate of 8% is to be sustained considering Agriculture's contribution to the GDP and also the large percentage of people who are deriving livelihood from agriculture also I think we wanted to derive tremendous advantage from the India having a very young population education reforms are must be the centerpiece for enabling them not to become a drag but to become an opportunity but apart from this question of constitutional reform on which solely who was here would have more to say both these subjects lying in the domain of the state government how doesn't begin to make credible progress in the reform of Agriculture which a sujud knows very well involves a management of the entire food economy the way in which procurement systems are done the need for crop diversification the symmetry between changing consumer preferences and the kind of crop production within the framework of the existing Constitution structure and if we can cannot change it in the short term then what can we do to gain the immediate advantage of it and similarly in regard to the education my second question is to regular armed Rajan I was glad to find the chief economist or the IMF preaching of the virtues of public investment while mentioning fiscal deficit as per say the two are not necessarily symmetrical which rather who knows very well but there are virtuous like short-term advantages in control cyclical measures on public investment which really begin to emphasize the gainful multiplier effects of investments particularly in infrastructure which is exactly something with the government Institute in the last three years particularly in regard to road power telecom and port some of which really are contributing to the kind of growth which we are seeing and I have a very simple answer to both agriculture as well as education if we take our vision for the next and the opportunities that exist in the next 30 years the first most important thing is to think of a sector and a self-sustaining basis we have got to change our mindset that only if government supports right that agriculture can flourish I think that we've got to empower the farmer we've got to make sure that government even in agriculture works as a facilitator and takes advantage of our competitive advance of our competitiveness in the sector and government rules really within agriculture is to open up the markets like I'm all of us have been talking about WTO for the last 50 years like with respect to all the economics we've opened up India but now for the next 30 years you've got to figure out whether the world is open for India or not agriculture is not open for India that government's first task and we should really have a self-sustaining revolution here right like my response on agriculture the key tasks before government really is not to focus inward it's to focus output on education again as I have said it's critical that we recognize that the task is huge government cannot deliver education the market has to deliver education to millions of our people 50 percent of our population is below the age of 25 and education is not a one-time activity in the life of a human being in the knowledge age you are going to have being like you are going to train yourself many many times over and again it's important to create facilitating environment this business of reducing fees right at the end of the day markets should learn to pay for themselves there is no point in subsidizing on an ongoing basis today like soon as you get admission into IIM I know of a lot of banks who will be waiting and contacting the students in terms of making sure that they give them money to be paid so access to money on a borrowed basis is available to everybody so again that's a change in mindset and I think on both these sectors we need to get out of a change of mindset and some of us like in industry like we've done very well in the last 20 years by lobbying government to get us out of their way I think that we need to give this technology both to the education sector and on the public investment absolutely by public I didn't necessarily mean that the government has to do it but certainly it is something which is very important the public-private partnerships that have been thought of would be an important part of this I do think that there is a virtual circle and if the government does enough maybe we can step out and let more take place in the private sector the first question is an India which class actually changing you know whether the circumstance in nineteen eighty ninety ninety this forestry be to change is there a bill to change or as Miss Lucchesi said are you ready to love you the politician to change and Mister to digitalize here and we participated in chandigarh conscience and particularly education the to edit education sector the public sector and the private sector the private sector cost is much less the quality in private sector is extremely experienced in the public sector the cost is higher and the dropout rate as well as the quality work my question is to both of them one can really study it to the systemic whether India's political class is changing with every life of a law in this countries around sixty years know Roy's you know lasts for 60 years way but using India's political class with change or no I think the what you're saying is it's not where you want it to be but where it's come from it certainly changed a lot the atmosphere of open discussion that certainly on the economic side the both politicians and bureaucrats engage in now this is a far cry from where it was in the earlier time so I think there has been a fair amount of change but I think you asked the relevant question is it enough and we need more and I think the answer is yes we need more well I think that just to respond to mr. Singler like and to add to the change to me like being in India is very evident in this year this is election year and for the first time we are like at least seeing issues of development right and we have major political parties talking about making India and economic superpower if you look at all our elections we've always and I had an American friend of mine and he said look like I mean it's surprising that your country in an election year is talking about peace because during elections everybody talks about war but we are talking about peace and we are talking about development like we've forgotten at least like from what we see on TV like Mandel Masjid religion war and we are all talking about development issues that itself should indicate to all of us that there is a change and we need to take this change right from minds of people to mind the hundreds of millions of people and then only will there be an economic development part that then becomes their diversity sir my name is Singhania both the gentlemen have expressed several preconditions required for a rapid economic growth in a democracy I presume democracy is synonymous with freedom but not the few gentlemen mentioned a precondition that I heard up from the writings of Field Marshal Montgomery as being a prerequisite for such a growth I wonder whether his thoughts would be applicable to India he said you can have discipline without Liberty but you cannot have Liberty without discipline do we need such an ingredient in India let me let me if I can take the privileges very clear - just expand on on two questions one which is of concern to everybody in which you both of you have rightly emphasized is the role of education which I completely agree there was just mention about I think whether you said that the government should move towards primary education and my question is whether it is time to think out of the box as to what role does a government have in primary education besides financing do you see the role of the government as anything beyond financing of education let me also cry and address that question I think when I say government I I mean the government has to play the role of facilitator which means remove as many of the obnoxious regulations that prevent movement but but facilitate the process and finance could be one aspect of facilitating but they could be others coordination of standards and so on in the education field testing which is something the government could do and might might actually be be useful there but but we point about about whether discipline is important I mean one of the things one wants to one of the right comparisons is between China and India on this date mentioned I think this clip works very well in certain aspects for example the way China has moved forward and once it's made up its mileage its moved very quickly on a variety of fronts but I think they still have the issue of catalyzing private investment of catalyzing more innovation which is something which doesn't require that much as much discipline as confidence and property rights and so on but then you want the energy of the people to sort of take over you need free spirit free thinking none of which is necessarily synonymous with disagreement I think on that dimension we have an advantage we don't let me mean indiscipline is the way to go but a certain amount of chaos can result in a lot more innovation and so the variety the vibrancy that is here might be actually helpful on that dimension questions on it Annelle quandary from New York McKay's your presentation was amazing one of the key things which comes out as education is the primary foundation that we're building for the future in that context I would say that if we go back 50 years and the last five decades the best brand image or the brand that has developed out of it there's the IITs world over if we look at history over the last couple of hundred years couple of the good brands have been Harvard University Oxford Cambridge and they have still managed to continue retaining their excellence do we really need to change the mindset of India or do we need to change the mindset of our politicians who need to stop interfering with good brand which is one of the things as they go don't try to fix something which is not broken and here is situation where we have so much of controversy going on trying to dilute the brand image of the IITs and when we look back at Harvard Oxford Cambridge Stanford they know they don't want to basically increase the number of campuses just because they want to Cree's their brand equity by doing so could you comment on that books can I collect two other questions it seems to be love interest this one day and one the gentleman there right there can you speak into the mic sir India has huge modern exchanges in fact they are flaunting it around as one of the features of India Chinese now it has been worked out that it cost to the economy are equivalent to 1% of GDP growth which is equivalent to 4% of growth in agriculture because agriculture is a 25% part of GDP is 25% of the GDP do you think it's a wise policy really to sacrifice so much growth in GDP which would in fact make us less dependent on monsoon if we were to really have an optimum level image thank you and there was a question both hands referred to reducing diplomatic but you can bureaucratic impediment are they referring to corruption rampant corruption well on the education like I can share with you my thoughts I've I think that it's critical to maintain autonomy of the educational institutions that we have got I relate to what mr. Bhandari said at the same time it's again very important like to build more capacity in our system given our population given the talent base that we have in our younger people like I believe that the IIT system today like you really have to be lucky because we need 97 or 98 to get there the guy who's got 95 might not necessarily be less caliber than the guy who's got 98 so the challenge before us is that how do we really increase capacity so that we can funnel all the right caliber in our economy and clearly autonomy like and is critical to sustaining any institution in terms of governance we really like need to think about and we really need radical transformation in governance like as I have said any incremental effort in governance are going to be more of the same and whether like we talked of corruption at at all levels unless we really think in terms of radical transformation in governance like that's really what I meant and that is our Challenger that is what the world is going to watch us on in the coming decade and since I agree with Buddha's arms that let me focus on the phone she reserved many ways the foreign exchange reserves are in residual and the the fact of the building up reflects other problems within the economy for example the fact that our tariffs are high so that we don't have as much in terms of imports as we need and that our investment is currently relatively low so I think the the issue to be raised is really have we exceeded the appropriate amount of reserves and I think we are fairly safe our reserves to external debt is huge so I don't think that we need more reserves in terms of safety and then the question that you raised about the low rate of return comes in and how do we stop accumulating more and more results well amongst the things we can do is reduce the tablet's further and increase investment incentives and both those will tend to reduce the build-up of reserves over time of obviously other measures like allowing more investment abroad by by Indian investors should be contemplated over time so that they reduce the build-up also thank you [Applause]

Channel: India Today Conclave

Views: 109,517

Keywords: General Bikram Singh, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Irrfan Khan, Brian Lara, Arjuna Ranatunga, Rahul Dravid, Narendra Modi, Pranab Mukherjee

Id: Ek8lxu3XUWY

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2017