Business & Technology
Imagining India takes a visionary look at the evolution and future of India by a preeminent business leader
India's recent economic boom—similar in scope to that of the United States during the early 1990s or Europe's during the 1970s—has triggered tremendous social, political, and cultural change. The result is a country that, while managing incredible economic growth, has also begun to fully inhabit its role on the world political stage. In this far-ranging look at the central ideas that have shaped this young nation, Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani offers a definitive and original interpretation of the country's past, present, and future.
India's future rests on more than simply economic growth; it also depends on reform and innovation in all sectors of public life. Imagining India traces the efforts of the country's past and present leaders as they work to develop new frameworks that suit India's specific characteristics and challenges. Imagining India charts the ideas that are crucial to India's current infrastructure revolution and quest for universal literacy, urbanization, and unification; maps the ideological battlegrounds of caste, higher education, and labor reform; and argues that only a safety net of ideas—from social security to public health to the environment—can transcend political agendas and safeguard India's economic future.
As a cofounder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, Nandan Nilekani has actively participated in the company's rise in the last fifteen years. In Imagining India, he uses the global experience and understanding he has gained at Infosys as a springboard from which to discuss the future of India and its role as a global citizen and emerging economic giant.
A fascinating window into the future of India, Imagining India engages with the central ideas and challenges that face the country—from within and as a part of the global economy—and charts a new way forward for a nation that has proved itself to be young, impatient, and vitally awake.
Read an excerpt from Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India:
Notes From An Accidental Entrepreneur
"If you can have such good roads in the Infosys campus, why are the roads outside so terrible?" demanded my visitor. I had just ended my pitch to him about why India was emerging as the world's next growth engine and how the country was rapidly catching up with the developed world. But my guest, who had flown in from New York, was openly skeptical, having spent two hours on Bangalore's chaotic, unforgiving Hosur highway to get to my office.
Although his question was one that I had heard several times, it always gave me pause. How could I respond without offering a long- winding explanation? I usually picked the short answer: "Politics," I mumbled. "Well," he persisted, "why don't people like you get into politics?" I told him this was not the United States, where a Michael Bloomberg could be the CEO of a large company one day and get elected as New York's mayor the next. Being an entrepreneur automatically made me a very long shot in Indian politics, and an easy target for populist rhetoric. I was, I said, quite unelectable.
But his questions got me thinking. The fact that the roads inside the Infosys campus were so good and so bad outside it was certainly not due to a lack of resources, technology or expertise. India has always seemed to be defined by such contradictions, to the point that our contrasts are clichés: Asia's second- largest slum is here, in the world's fastest- growing democracy. A nation that is a burgeoning knowledge power also has the largest number of school dropouts in the world. Our biggest businesses are building international brands, yet red tape continues to throttle the new entrepreneur and frustrate the small business owner.
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