Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad, the guru of post-modern management, on Thursday threw the dream of leadership in the new world order by 2022 at a large and influential section of India Inc.
India, Prahalad said, can have by 2022 the world's largest pool of trained manpower (500 million skilled workers), 30 companies in the Fortune 100 list, 10 per cent of world trade and 10 Nobel Prize winners. On the softer side, it can become the source for global innovation and a new moral voice for people around the world.
He spelt out his vision for India @ 75 at a five-star hotel in New Delhi, where over 700 members of the Confederation of Indian Industry, a third of them on video link, listened to him in rapt attention. Several bureaucrats too were seen in the audience.
Briefing a select group of journalists earlier in the morning, Prahalad said he had deliberately kept the means of getting there out so that the focus could be kept on the goals. But he said that even in the current circumstances, the probability of meeting the targets was high.
The vision has been adopted by the CII, which will now look at how to make it happen. Sources at the industry association said the need for such a target was felt after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the new leadership, under ICICI Bank Managing Director & CEO KV Kamath a few days ago, to work out a long-term vision.
CII did not have to go far in search of such a piece of work. Prahalad, who is a professor at the University of Michigan, had actually spelt out the details of his vision, India @ 75 at the India @ 60 celebrations of CII at New York in September 2007. He touched down in New Delhi late last night.
Prahalad said his earlier targets for India were no less audacious but were still met. "I had talked of Indian multinationals in the mid-1990s. Who would have believed it," he said, adding: "Seven years ago, I had suggested a target of 10 per cent growth (in gross domestic product). Many in India had said we don't have resources for 10 per cent growth."
Still, it would be tough to achieve the targets of India @ 75. To begin with, India faces an acute shortage of workforce across sectors. Several businessmen now identify it as the biggest impediment to their growth. The target of trained 500 million workers, experts said, is a far cry.
The country's share in world trade is 1.5 per cent way below his target of 10 per cent. And not a single Indian company finds a slot in the list of top 100 companies, though India has turned into a nursery for billionaire businessmen.
Having exhorted companies the world over to seek their fortune at the bottom of the value pyramid, Prahalad said that Indians need to 'straddle the pyramid' to make the India @ 75 vision happen.
On the civic side, he said the prerequisites for growth were an emphasis on individual rights as against group rights and the urgent need to treat corruption as treason. "A nation becomes less corrupt before it gets rich," he had said at the India @ 60.
