tells

that

,

are good ideas but change takes time in India. He also said fast growing economies are those where every citizen feels enthusiastic and participatory.

With the exciting discovery of gravitational waves do Indian scientists need to be encouraged to do this kind of world class research?

There is a lot of buzz around startups now. Infosys was the original startup. Any advice for the startup entrepreneurs?

Does it worry you that Start Up India, Make in India,

at the moment are slogans and not yet realities?

Infosys as a startup was a beneficiary of the liberalization process started in 1991. Does more credit need to be given to Manmohan Singh for those years than is given?

But are entrepreneurs still regarded with suspicion in India?

Do you believe that the success of the infotech sector happened because the government withdrew and that's the model the government should follow with regard to business?

So the ease of doing business has not improved?

You've expressed your concerns on rising intolerance. Do you still believe there's a problem?

Higher education is one of your pet concerns. What needs to be done?

Your take on the economy at the moment?

Thomas Piketty says in his book that capitalism creates more inequality than growth.

But how do you end the political logjam?

So what advice would you give the FM for the Budget? Raghuram Rajan says don't let the fiscal deficit rise, others say spend more?

There are instances where young Indian scientists have done well. Am told that ICTS in Bangalore and IUCAA in Pune had a contribution to the discovery of gravitational waves. But this is an exception. India with a population of 1.3 billion people needs is to increase the number of high quality world class scientific talent so that we can solve the basic problems of healthcare, nutrition, shelter and education.For example, when quantum mechanics was discovered, who in the world knew that Heisenberg's matrix approach and Schrodinger's wave equation approach would lead to DVDs, laser printers etc? I believe that if we have to solve the problems for the vast multitude, the only way you can do it is through the power of science and technology.Any startup has a dream to transform the world with its idea. Therefore the idea is very important. Second, that idea must provide a differentiated business value to customers compared to others. Third, it's necessary to conduct an inexpensive test marketing of the idea before going the whole hog. Entrepreneurs spend their prime years pursuing these ideas.Fourth, entrepreneurship is about deferred gratification. It's all about sacrifice today in the hope that tomorrow will bring a fortune. Such sacrifice requires a good value system. In order to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to bring together a team with complementary strengths. And remember everybody in this team would have made sacrifice in terms of compensation, hard work, time away from their loved ones. So a good value system has to be practised. By this I mean a protocol of behaviour by the members of a team to enhance the trust of each member in everybody else's mind. All the stars of StartUp India should remember these factors.Everything starts with a dream, you can't dismiss them as slogans. But yes, the path of going from dream to reality is a very tough one. Entrepreneurs themselves and all of us who cheer them on, the government that makes their life easier, society, we all have to help. It's not easy to translate dreams into reality and they all have to work harder.PM Modi is a very good orator and great speaker. He exhorts people very well. There is no doubt that these various initiatives Start Up India, Make in India, Digital India, are all very good ideas. Digital India particularly can provide remote education and health care for people who don't have access and connect farmers with the rural market.But bringing about a change in India is always slow because our political structure distributes power between Centre and states and the states are quite strong. So a lot of the reforms that are required will have to be taken up by the states. It's not possible for the Centre to alone bring about reforms. It's not proper for us blame any one entity. But yes, there is an air of wanting to do things in Delhi. The PM's announcement that startups will not be burdened with taxes for the first three years is a positive signal. The announcement that hassles on labour laws and factory inspectors will not be there for the first three years is also a good thing.But the chief ministers of all states and the central government must sit down and work out together what can be done to make the lives of entrepreneurs easier. Co-operation of states is key.The credit has to be given first to PV Narasimha Rao, then to Dr Manmohan Singh and to P Chidambaram and also to Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Without them doing what they did, we could not have achieved the transformation we have today of the Indian industry. And you know, it all happened in a week. In a week, they did the impossible. They abolished licensing in most sectors. We used to come to Delhi repeatedly, it would take 3 years to get a license to import a computer. That was changed.Then they introduced current account convertibility. Before that we had to apply and wait endlessly for foreign exchange from the RBI. Current account convertibility allowed us to open offices abroad, to send our employees to man those offices, hire consultants from abroad in quality and branding. Without this, Indian companies could not have become international.Then they abolished the office of the Controller of Capital Issues. There used to be a civil servant who sat in Delhi who did not understand anything about capital markets and he was supposed to decide on the pricing of the IPO. Manmohan Singh realized that this office was unnecessary and abolished it. He then told entrepreneurs that you can go public at a price which you can decide with your investment bankers. So now there was much greater incentive to do so.It's changing slowly but as a nation we still think that poverty is a virtue. Anybody who has acquired some wealth is looked at with a level of scepticism and suspicion. The reason for this is that the pay of politicians and bureaucrats is very low compared to the pay of CEOs etc who go to them for approval. So naturally, there's always a little bit of hostility. I can understand. This doesn't happen in countries like Singapore because there bureaucrats and CEOs get similar salaries.Several ministers from both sides of aisle have spoken about how it was the absence of government controls that allowed this industry to grow at an accelerated pace. This has been voiced by ministers in the previous government and in this one. It's now an accepted wisdom.But on the role of the government, I would say, we have to move away from the current method of control to a different method of regulation. In developed societies, there's strong regulation but there's no stifling of businesses due to excessive controls. Anybody who violates any law is punished heavily. That is required. But until one is proven guilty, the others should be allowed to conduct their business effectively.For example what is happening today in the FCRA is a classic example. Everybody and his brother who receives any donation even from within India has to obtain FCRA approval. Now this is not necessary. Instead what should happen is that anyone who is to receive a donation from abroad should provide the details to the government and they should on a random basis, carry out checks. Today the FCRA has become a bottleneck for organizations. How will small NGOs obtain FCRA clearance? Instead, they should do random checking and make it clear that if there is any violation they will take strict action.I do think a lot of progress has to be made in making it easier for businesses to grow. The controlling mindset continues, that's the problem.Look, wherever I go, I have seen that societies that have made fast economic progress are those where every citizen is enthusiastic, participatory and committed. So therefore, the need of the day is to bring about a sense of oneness, of the commonality of our aspirations and desires and commit ourselves about to bringing these changes.We have to enhance our openness to accept ideas from outside India. We have to create mechanisms for interactions between universities abroad and here, we have to welcome more and more scholars from outside, send more scholars abroad from India, there must be more scholarships to go abroad and study. We must interact a lot more with institutions that have done better than us. That's key.Also we have to create more private universities, make them independent. In the longer term many of them have worked well.Well, most people are saying we are growing at 7 or 7 and a half per cent. That's not bad. But we do not collect accurate data on unemployment. Unemployment worries me. In Bangalore, I interact with lots of young people, many come looking for jobs, most of them do not have skills and are looking for menial jobs, but there are no jobs. Low tech manufacturing is the way that the not so well educated may get some opportunities.You see, China is only country in the world that has created 150 million jobs in last 25 years. No other country has done that. On its eastern seaboard, China created cities dedicated to exports. They created lots of export processing zones, gave them autonomy to accelerate growth. Now it's difficult for us to do this because of course in rural areas we don't have electricity and roads. But if we want to give jobs to the 400-450 million illiterates and 200-250 million semi-literates, we have to go in for low tech manufacturing that does not require high levels of education. This is how China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea did it.There is no better alternative to capitalism. But inequality is increasing because the leaders of capitalism have to themselves exercise some restraint on their salaries, on the lives they lead, on the luxuries they spend their money on. Societies that have embraced capitalism have to create mechanisms that look to bettering opportunities for the poorer sections. There is a craving among the rich to reduce taxes. If you do this, governments have less money to spend on the basic needs of the poor.So we have to adopt a capitalistic-socialistic model like the Scandinavian and some European countries. Fully allow people to leverage their ideas to acquire wealth, but at the same time tax levels are also higher. This allows them to increase allocation for health, education, nutrition of the poor. So we need to combine the good ideas of capitalism and the good ideas of socialism. Demand from the rich and spend on the poor.Every party should accept some 'ism'. They should decide on what they want to embrace, capitalism, socialism or any other ism. And they should vote for or oppose the government based on their own 'ism' and not just for the sake of opposing. Maybe there's a need to set up a school of the political economic principles of governance for those who want to enter politics so they're all on the same page. They can then reduce their disagreements, if these disagreements are on principles and governments can take quicker decisions.Raghuram Rajan is a very bright person. I agree with him on the need to control spending. It's important to use whatever money we have in an efficient, honest and transparent way and get the best bang for the buck. We have to be careful about spending, otherwise our deficits will go higher and higher. We have to spend wisely and carefully and get maximum benefit. We have to bring honesty, efficiency and transparency in the spending of public money. That's my view. I don't know if the FM is waiting for advice from me!