Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower Read Free

note India’s reluctance to allow foreign multinationals into Indian markets. But Harsha Bhogle’s essay on cricket examines how creating greater equality of opportunity helped make India a global superpower in the game. Geet Sethi considers what it will take for India to field a contingent of truly competitive Olympic athletes. Novelist Manu Joseph, meanwhile, highlights the hypocrisy of India’s middle classes, who decry family patronage in politics and reservations for members of disadvantaged castes, while they themselves live in a “paradise” of entitlement and protected privileges.
    The quest for inclusive growth: A recurrent theme in many essays is the importance of ensuring that the benefits of economic growth are widely shared. Authors acknowledge there are no easy solutions to this challenge, but many express hope that technology can help India close the gap between rich and poor. Education is one area where technology has vast potential to reduce inequality. Digital educators Salman Khan and Shantanu Sinha contend the world is on the verge of another “printing press moment,” which will break the elite’s grip on the essentials of education, making available to millions of aspiring learners online knowledgeand ideas once restricted to the lecture halls of Harvard or Stanford. K. Srinath Reddy sees similar possibilities in health care, citing the example of the Swasthya Slate, a tablet device that enables users to perform various diagnostic tests including electrocardiograms, as well as blood sugar, blood pressure, and heart rate readings. Former Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani, now head of the government’s unique identity program, explains how his agency is using digital and biometric technologies to help low-income Indians gain access to government services and benefits to which they are entitled.
    Innovation and leapfrogging: Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is one of a number of authors who argue that as a developing nation India should employ a “leapfrog mentality” to find unique new pathways to a better future—not only in education and health, but in areas like energy and infrastructure. So, for example, rather than blindly following in the footsteps of developed countries by trying to build more highways to accommodate more cars, India should think about what would be the best transportation system for self-driving vehicles. Khosla is one of several authors who urge India to do more to help new players and entrepreneurs rather than simply conferring benefits on established firms.
    Sustainable development: Former Shell Oil executive Vikram Singh Mehta deplores India’s counterproductive, contradictory energy policies. Vedanta chairman Anil Agarwal wonders why India lags so far behind in exploring its vast mineral wealth. Historian Ramachandra Guha counters that over the past twenty years India has rolled back many of the sustainable environmental policies it had begun to put in place, and is encouraging a Western-style consumer culture that imperils the planet’s future. “India today,” he writes, “is an environmental basket case, marked by polluted skies, dead rivers, falling water tables, ever-increasing amounts of untreated wastes, disappearing forests.”
    Finding India’s place in the world: We are delighted to be able to feature in this volume essays by an extraordinary lineup of foreign policy thinkers.Bill Emmott urges India to revive Nehru’s expansive vision for India as regional leader in Asia. Stephen P. Cohen, Ahmed Rashid, and Bruce Riedel offer specific advice on how to fine-tune India’s relations with, respectively, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States.
    A team of McKinsey consultants makes the case that India’s companies, too, must take a more expansive international role—and offers a number of specific suggestions for how they might do so. Aditya Birla Group CEO Kumar Mangalam Birla shares his experiences leading one of Indian’s most successful global