New Delhi: Tata Group Chairman N Chandrasekaran, while addressing a session on ‘Inspired India: A Business Leader’s Perspective’ during FICCI’s 93rd Annual General Meeting on Saturday said that the 2020s belong to India, which has ‘tremendous, limitless opportunities’ lying ahead.

“My roots that are embedded in technology make me see the COVID pandemic and its impact on India in a very positive frame of mind. The 2020s belong to India,” he said, adding the impact of COVID on innovation has been all-pervasive and models of working from home are making all companies rethink the future of work.  

Elaborating further, Chandrasekaran said that self-evident trends- advancement of digital data by almost a decade during the pandemic; decoupling of China on the United States that signifies that countries and companies will need to de-risk and balance their supply chains on a marketing basis for the future, fortify this belief.  

“In all these trends I see tremendous, limitless opportunities in India. We have often struggled to grow manufacturing as a percentage of our GDP. We usually highlight issues like power, logistics, and labour. We have pointed out high-interest rates and have also understood regulatory overreach and interference,” he said. 

But in the future, if we put this behind us and as an industry start acting by visionary scale, we will become a pivot to the new world order. We need a new focus on talent, enable data and bandwidth and we need to be a part of the new regulatory standards, added Chandrasekaran.

“I see a collaborative role between the industry and the government. The industry should be bold and start visioning all projects at scale and the government should enable this partnership and make India ready to participate in this new world,” said Chandrasekaran.  

“We need to also re-imagine the whole technology blueprint nationwide. To do this it is vital that technologies like Robotics and AI become part of the mainstay of manufacturing. We need to recognize the fact that tech manufacturing and energy are converging in the creation of new platforms, on new ecosystems,” he said. 

Chandrasekaran further stated that if India’s first plank for the 21st century’s growth is digital; the second plank is the new approach to global poly-chains. India’s strength is our North Eastern talent pool and we can leverage this to become a key player in global value chains. The third plank for India is environmental resilience. Within two decades nearly 20 new energy sources could likely be powering the global economy. Energy efficiency in mobility, solar manufacturing, and rethinking our food supply chain or areas to focus on as we emerge from the pandemic.   
Uday Shankar, President-Elect, FICCI, said that FICCI’s annual convention is taking place at a crucial time. While on one hand, we must keep going while facing the challenges, we need to also cash in on opportunities to show courage and leadership at the global level to put brand India at new heights. “We should look at the models of investments,” he said. Sanjiv Mehta, Vice President, FICCI, said that it is now the right opportunity to dream about a new India and an inspired India. /BI/