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The Rediff Business Special/ Mukesh Ambani

'By 2020, India can be one of the five economic superpowers'

I propose to use this opportunity to take you with me on a journey into the future. For sharing a dream. Endeavouring to make this dream a reality.

(Right: Mukesh Ambani) We are standing on the threshold of a new millennium. What will this world look like as we made through the first twenty years of the 21^st century? In that world where will India find herself? Is her destiny pre-determined? Or can this generation, our generation, defy the prophets of doom? Can we carve out for her a proud and glorious future? What must we preserve and nourish? What should we discard?

These questions are hovering in my mind as I stand before this gathering of highly educated and progressive women and enthusiastic and experienced men of this great city.

The changing world

We are living in a world that is changing at an incredible pace. In the information age, words are acquiring new meanings. Address no longer indicates where one lives. It is the location of information in computer memory. The mouse is not a rodent. It is a hand-held control device. Communications and information technology is the biggest technological juggernaut to have ever rolled on this earth -- redefining the way we think, act, work, play -- triggering massive economic, social and cultural changes.

Children will spend more time with computers than conversing with their parents, reading or playing. The Internet and Web TV will be an integral part of our daily lives. For a family, more than providing separate bedrooms for our children, we will have to provide for separate Web TVs so that they can learn play and entertain. Children will be using CD-ROMs, to virtually traverse the oceans and the continents, explore unknown places, create movies, simulate earthquakes, pilot planes, command spacecrafts and take moon walks. The expanse of a child's mind will be limitless. Undoubtedly the world will have more self confidence, self-absorbed and informed children.

Life will no longer be divided in neat phases of education, work, and retirement. Once an individual had acquired basic literacy, education will be a life long activity. Training and retraining will be the essence of skill creation. Those who ignore this will relapse into functional illiteracy. More people will be consuming the same array of worldly goods than at any time in history. However, as material needs are met, spiritual hunger will grow. Our planet will not remain merely a global village. It will almost become an extended family.

Governments today derive power from secrecy. The Official Secrets Act is inviolable. This will soon become a relic of the past. Transparency will become the order of the day. Not because governments will become generous and large hearted. Because it will be beyond the power of any government to block access to information.

Economic scenes all over the world will be dominated by globalisation. Growth in trade will outstrip growth in our put world over.

What Globalisation will mean

Examples of ingredients of globalisation will be: greater flows of investment to less developed countries, lightening speed of technological transmission, giant sounds of European and American jobs lost to emerging economies, global dominance of brands like Coca-Cola, CNN, Reebok, and Nescafe.

Globalisation will result in a different paradigm of opportunities and inter-dependencies for economies as well as new terms and conditions for corporate competitive success. Just as water changes to a solid when temperature drops one degree at 32 degree F mark, so there is a threshold -- where the addition of one more degree of globalisation will create a totally different reality in which corporations as agents of capital and technology must adjust. A company's failure of anticipatory intellect or lack of vigilance and preparedness could have terrible consequences. Our world will be a perpetual turmoil. It will be a creative and challenging turbulence. There will be a revolution in the ways businesses are organised, industry is conceived, wealth is created and knowledge imparted. Incredible technological innovations will drive information revolution to new frontiers.

The technology revolution

Several new technologies will place unprecedented power and opportunities in the hands of our children. Genetic engineering -- Genome mapping with gene probes -- that will predict who will get what disease. Anti-ageing products that are based on genetic manipulation to slow ageing. Insulin pumps embedded in the bodies of diabetics. These are all expected to be a reality in the coming 5 to 10 years. We will see amazing breakthroughs -- miniaturisation will be the order of the day in all fields ranging from medicine to electronics to entertainment to education. The electronic membrane covering the earth will wire all humanity together in a single nervous system.

For the status-quoist mind, this is a bewildering scenario. For the dynamic mind, ready to absorb these momentous changes and adapt them, it unfolds exciting and unprecedented opportunities. The meek will be stunned. The courageous will soar to me heights. Here my dream begins to take shape.

An unprecedented opportunity

I believe this all embracing technological revolution has opened up for India an unprecedented opportunity. After a long time we have a chance to free our people from poverty, illiteracy and drudgery. We can make the 21^st century "The Indian Century." By 2020, we can make India one of the five major economic powers in the world along with the USA, Germany, China, and Japan. This is my dream. I wish to share it with you. Not only the dream but the strategy that can make it a reality.

The votaries of leisurely growth will, I know, greet this vision with cynicism. How can a country with 400 million living on less than one US dollar per day entertain this ambition? How can people, half of whom are illiterate, aspire to become a world economic power? Does our record justify such ambition? I do not dismiss these questions lightly. Nevertheless, I refuse to be dispirited by them. I will like to assure you mine is not a poet's fantasy. The impressive edifice of this vision rests on solid foundations.

Mukesh Ambani, continued