India has the potential manpower of 200 million college graduates and 500 million skilled workers, and the ability to generate over 10 percent of world trade in the next 15 years, provided leaders prioritize this goal.
What must be done to fulfill these great expectations?
Bio
Tarun Das
Tarun Das is the Chief Mentor of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). CII is a national organization servicing and representing Indian Industry. Its principal objective is to provide information, advisory and consultative services to both government and industry.
With close to 5,000 member-companies from public and private sectors and with a reach of 60,000 through its affiliated associations, CII is represented on major policymaking bodies concerned with Indian industry and is deeply involved in promoting business cooperation internationally. At present, he is also Non-Executive Chairman of The Associated Cement Companies Ltd. (ACC) and Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd. (HPL).
He is also a member of the Coca-Cola Company International Advisory Board and a Non-Executive Director, John Keells Holdings Ltd., Sri Lanka.
Coimbatore Krishnao Prahalad
C.K. Prahalad is Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan Business School. He is a globally recognized business consultant who has worked with senior management at many of the world's top companies.
Prahalad's groundbreaking article, "The End of Corporate Imperialism", won the 1998 McKinsey Prize as the year's best Harvard Business Review article. With Professor Stu Hart, he co-authored a seminal working paper The Strategies for the Bottom of the Pyramid, helping to launch a global movement towards private-sector solutions for global poverty.
Prahalad was named the most influential management thinker alive by Thinkers 50 in 2007 and again in 2009.
Raghuram Rajan
Raghuram Rajan is the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
Dr. Rajan is also currently an economic advisor to the Prime Minister of India. Prior to resuming teaching in 2007, Dr. Rajan was the Economic Counselor and Director of Research (in plain English, the Chief Economist) at the International Monetary Fund (from 2003).
Since then, he has chaired the Indian government's Committee on Financial Sector Reforms, which submitted its report in September 2008.
Dr. Rajan's research interests are in banking, corporate finance, and economic development, especially the role finance plays in it. His papers have been published in all the top economics and finance journals, and he has served on the editorial board of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Finance. He has also written a book with Luigi Zingales entitled Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. He is currently at work on a book entitled Fault Lines: How Hidden Cracks Still Threaten the World Economy.
Dr. Rajan is a senior advisor to Booz and Co, on the academic advisory board of Moodys, and on the international advisory board of Bank Itau-Unibanco. He is a director of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and on the Comptroller General of the United State's Advisory Council. Dr. Rajan is the current Vice President of the American Finance Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2003, the American Finance Association awarded Dr. Rajan the inaugural Fischer Black Prize, given every two years to the financial economist under age 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the theory and practice of finance.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Country, South Asia. It fronts the Bay of Bengal on the southeast and the Arabian Sea on the southwest. Area: 1,222,559 sq mi (3,166,414 sq km). Population (2009 est.): 1,198,003,000. Capital: New Delhi. The peoples of India comprise widely varying mixtures of ethnic strains drawn from peoples settled in the subcontinent before the dawn of history or from invaders. Languages: Hindi, English (both official), and other Indo-European languages, including Bengali, Kashmiri, Marathi, and Urdu; Dravidian languages; hundreds from several other language families. Religions: Hinduism; also Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism. Currency: rupee. India has three major geographic regions: the Himalayas, along its northern border; the Indo-Gangetic Plain, formed by the alluvial deposits of three great river systems, including the Ganges (Ganga); and the southern region, noted for the Deccan plateau. Agricultural products include rice, wheat, cotton, sugarcane, coconut, spices, jute, tobacco, tea, coffee, and rubber. The manufacturing sector is highly diversified and includes both heavy and high-technology industries. India is a multiparty federal republic with two legislative houses; its head of state is the president, and the head of government is the prime minister. India has been inhabited for thousands of years. Agriculture in India dates to the 7th millennium BCE, and an urban civilization, that of the Indus valley, was established by 2600 BCE. Buddhism and Jainism arose in the 6th century BCE in reaction to the caste-based society created by the Vedic religion and its successor, Hinduism. The first Muslim contact with the subcontinent was in the 8th century CE. Muslim invasions began after c. 1000, establishing the long-lived Delhi sultanate in 1206 and the Mughal dynasty in 1526. Vasco da Gama's voyage to India in 1498 initiated several centuries of commercial rivalry between the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. British conquests in the 18th and 19th centuries led to the rule of the British East India Co., and direct administration by the British Empire began in 1858. After Mohandas K. Gandhi helped end British rule in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru became India's first prime minister, and Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi retained that office for all but a few years during more than three succeeding decades. The subcontinent was partitioned into two countries—India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority—in 1947. A later clash with Pakistan resulted in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. In the 1980s and '90s Sikhs sought to establish an independent state in Punjab, and ethnic and religious conflicts took place in other parts of the country as well. In 2004 Manmohan Singh, a Sikh, became the country's first non-Hindu prime minister. The Kashmir region in the northwest has been a source of constant tension.
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