Collaboration Between Government, Corporates, NGOs- Key To Bringing Transformational Change: Piyush Goyal

At the closing plenary session called The New India at the India Economic Summit 2017, organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry and World Economic Forum, prominent personalities and the co-chairs of the India Economic Summit shared their reflections from the India Economic Summit and envisioned their narrative for the new India with Shereen Bhan, Managing Editor, CNBC-TV18 serving as the moderator.

“We have talked about many things, from digitization to financial inclusion, diversity in the workplace, pollution, several things about what India needs to do to enhance the quality of life of its citizens as well as enhance its economic power”, said Bhan. Upon being asked about his actionable agenda at the end of the summit, Piyush Goyal, Minister of Railways and Coal, Ministry of Railways and Coal, said, “We should focus on two issues, a mindset issue and an involvement issue. I have always enjoyed getting feedback, which improves our work and our effort. Focusing on what’s gone wrong is fine, but if it’s done to disrupt the positive environment, it will be wrong for our country. It’s very easy to sensationalize without focusing on the outcome. Very often falsehoods are sensationalized without even an apology. So basically, I would like more transparency in what is projected. Second is involvement of more people, as we say, ‘Be the change you want to see’. We need to channelize our own energies to get more involvement in this changing dynamic that the country is going through. We should also become whistle-blowers, if we see something wrong, we have got to talk about it, for example, if someone is evading taxes, it should be brought to notice rather than cribbing and crying that it is someone else’s responsibility.” He also added, “You don’t need to have domain expertise to bring about change. I didn’t know the P of Power or the C of Coal when I became Minister. Sreedharan didn’t know about Metros and he became the metro man of India. In my mind, you have to encourage diversity of opinion, diversity of experience. Just education doesn’t make a man what he is, some of the most educated people have run the biggest frauds in the country.”

On being asked about jobs, Ajay S. Banga, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mastercard, said, “I completely agree with Piyush about the fact that we can take the onus about the kind of leader we want to be, and institute change. Mr Goyal in his 32 days as Railways Minister is planning to create 1 million jobs, someone else here is planning to revamp the tourism industry to create more jobs. That’s two people, bite-sized chunks to bring about change. Change and overhaul cannot happen overnight, break the problem down into bite-sized chunks, create a process of measuring it, colour code it and then chase it down.” On being asked about the role corporations can play in bringing about societal change, Banga added, “You have to do well and do good at the same time. As corporations, you are not working in a vacuum, you are working in a community, so you have to make sure you are engaging in a constructive way with everybody. The 2% is a really good idea as it creates a discipline in putting the money back, but the problem is that there isn’t enough philanthropic money in the world or government money in the world to solve some of the challenges we are all facing”. “Public-Private Partnership is becoming the flavour of the month right now because you need the public sector to create the regulation and guide rails for the private sector to bring in capital, ingenuity and balance-sheets and making doing better a part of our business model, and that is inclusive growth. Inclusive growth matters not only because of inclusion but because inclusive growth is the way to prosperity and the way to prosperity is my business-model, therefore I can justify to my shareholders that working in collaboration with the government and civil society, I can make a difference. That is doing good and doing well”, added Banga.

Dipali Goenka, Chief Executive Officer and Joint Managing Director, Welspun India Ltd, on being asked about what corporates and government can do to move up when it comes to job creation, said, “For corporates, it’s how we look at the grass-root level deployment of the youth population, because non-farming jobs is critical and apart from that women deployment is very important.” She also added, “The remedy to fix gender ratio from the corporate perspective is that till we don’t ourselves become agents of change and commit to bringing change, nothing can happen, the commitment has to come from our end. For skill development, the initiatives the government has taken, I think we have to take the lead. We actually skill 10,000 youth every year.”

On being asked about inclusion and education, Malvika Iyer, Member, Working Group on Youth and Gender Equality, United Nations Inter-Agency Network on Youth Development said, “Banking on the future is a treacherous endeavour. As a woman, and a disabled woman, I can taste the prejudice in the air and feel the people discriminating against me, and we can play an endless statistical game, but the truth is, we as a nation need to be more cognizant of how we perceive our fellows. Education must be well-rounded. On the steep hill to educate our children about civic behaviour, here is my first lesson, do not stare, period. Our attitudes towards those different from us, may it be gender, age, religion, all of these have an effect on the overall stability of the nation. Attitude affects one’s perception, perception affects one’s communication, and communication affects one’s actions, so the integral of all individual action must amount to the idea of society and the character of the nation.” She also added, “Mental health is also very important and it is an aspect that is often not paid much attention and sometimes even willfully ignored among the educated. There is a stigma associated with seeking help for mental health. Mental health has a direct effect on one’s ability on realizing their true potential. With a large population, it will affect our nation’s stability if we don’t pay enough attention to mental health”.

 “If NGOs, government schemes and CSR, if we can dove-tail that, we can get a big bank for every buck that we spend and leverage that to multiply many-fold. And stop duplication, people are working towards the same goals but in silos, if we can dove-tail all that, it can have a transformational impact”, said Goyal, speaking about collaboration.

In his concluding remarks, Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), said, “Partnership between government, corporates, civil society and stakeholders, as shown by this Forum, is the way forward and the willingness to collaborate as the international community participated too, and brought policy-makers, corporates, civil society together is a window of opportunity that India has and can bring about transformational changes for a New India.”

Anurit Kanti

BW Reporters The author is correspondent at BW Businessworld, he has a keen interest in sustainability and environmental economics