Supported by

Platinum Sponsor

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Bronze Sponsors

Growth - A Prerequisite for Inclusive Growth: If India had continued to grow at 3.5%, we would have been the poorest country in the world. It is the surpluses generated due to the high growth rates achieved through reforms of the nineties that have funded inclusive growth efforts like Bharat Nirman schemes etc. While some of the gains of this growth have been diluted through leaking public delivery systems, the India growth story itself seems to be slowing down.

It is now time for all stakeholders to come together and work towards a consensus on a common minimum economic program that at least delivers 8% growth on a sustained basis – a necessity for India to become even a middle-income country by 2025 and a pre-requisite for generating the surpluses for inclusive growth.

Real Sector - Real Issues: Over the past few years the real sector has emerged as the favourite whipping boy. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Leaving little incentive for investments being made in India. From land acquisition to environment to laws with retrospective impact, is India losing its attraction as an investment destination? The great IT success story is a question mark due to policies on hardware procurement and taxation on global software income of R&Ds situated in India. Such steps may even be viewed as backward and create a concern of coming back to the situation prevailing before the nineties. Is all of this real or there still are strong reasons for investing in India?

Living with Inflation to Grow: Is there now a need to relook at the monetary policy and make its centrality to be pro-growth rather than anti-inflation. This would need a complete change of mindset and the political will to bet on India’s future. If India had continued to grow at 3.5%, we would have been the poorest country in the world. The 8% or so growth rate has yielded some dividends. Could the resultant impact on inflation have been handled better by RBI – accused of taking baby steps on increasing rates when decisive action was required and now doing the same in the reverse direction. What would it take to have a new - courageous monetary policy?

Rediscovering MSMEs and Self-Employment: The appalling performance on generating new jobs comes out starkly with the latest round of NSSO figures. Some of the areas that could have been the major drivers for employment generation i.e. MSMEs and Self- employment have been neglected. While employability is a market response to employment, there is a schemes and spending galore on skill development with little or no accountability on employment generation. Are we creating an army of skilled un-employed from un-skilled, under-employed? What are the correctives required?

Financial Inclusion - Time for a Holistic Approach: With the financial inclusion schemes launched with much aplomb having been reduced to a technology procurement and non-operational account opening farce, it is time now to go back to the basics and arrest the decline in practically all development and priority sector banking parameters. A few banks have managed to link FI to development banking, can the larger community take note of and learn from these handful of experiences.