Issues not glossed over in 'Reimagining India': Zainulbhai

The euphoria over India has given way to tiredness. Not too long ago global CEOs were palpably excited about the opportunity that the country presented. Today their passion has given way to politeness as they look over the shoulders searchingly for the next big emerging opportunity - has India blown it? Adil Zainulbhai, Chairman, McKinsey India doesn't think so. He convinced over 60 of the brightest minds in the world to share their prescription and what is needed for India to rise and shine as quickly as it should. The result is a book – 'Reimagining India – Unlocking the potential of Asia's next superpower'.

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He says the idea of the book is to answer some of the questions in the minds of the people, including 'will India forever remain a question mark, will it ever reach its potential'. Some of the greatest Indian entrepreneurs, along with a series of economists, journalists, observers, writers and then a whole series of people shared their views. These industry veterans have not just glossed over issues such as corruption and inflation, but have given detailed outlook.

Below is the verbatim transcript of Adil Zainulbhai's interview on CNBC-TV18

Q: This book follows reimagining Japan. That’s a book that came out after tsunami left a trade of destruction in Japan. What is the timing of this book? Is it the destruction of sentiment of India?

A: The idea of reimagining Japan started way before the disaster and as it was about to be published, the tsunami hit, etc., and so we had to rewrite a little bit of it. But in this case it has nothing to do with the natural disaster. It is just that we had a sense as you said that there was mounting frustration about India’s growth story. Was it finished, will India forever remain a question mark, will it ever reach its potential and we thought that people were getting the wrong impression based on either headlines or little sound bytes that they heard around the world and so the idea was to take a longer term view to look at all the problems we have and not skip over them but then think about what would be needed to be done so that we could realize the potential.

So, we thought rather than us writing something which McKinsey wrote, it might be very dense etc, we thought we would try and get other peoples' views and so in this case it is about 65 authors roughly 60 percent Indian, 20-25 percent Diasporas and the rest is international. It has a good sprinkling of chief executive officers (CEOs) from Mr. Ambani to Kumar Mangalam Birla to Anand Mahindra in India, plus a bunch of others plus Bill Gates, the CEO of Google, CEO of Cisco, CEO of UTC, CEO of Tesco etc. So, there was a lot of interest from people around the world, from CEOs around the world to talk about India in a more detailed context. In addition we have a series of economists, journalists, observers, writers and then we have whole series of people who talk about India as a soft power. So, there is a wonderful essay on cricket.

In addition to India's hard power, India's soft power is booming around the world and the interesting things coming out of India. So, if you took a 20 or 30 year perspective, as many people do and talk about the potential, you will see that many of the underlying factors are still very valid. Bill Gates talks about this and he says, India's potential is limitless and in his wonderful essay he says that the progress that they made in evacuating polio was phenomenal. So, his view was that when the government, when lots of people and people on the ground wanted to get something accomplished, it happened very fast. It just says the potential is there; somehow we have to get answers out and make it happen.

Q: Would you say that Indian authors, Mukesh Ambani, Anand Mahindra, all the rest of the Indian authors were either more frustrated about India or were they more positive about India than the foreign authors because we see it much closer?

A: It is tough to say. One is more frustrated or optimistic than the other. There is a wide set of people, for example today as you know our current account deficit is based on a large amount of imports of oil, gold, etc and we are not energy self-sufficient. There are two essays by Anil Agarwal and Vikram Singh Mehta, who talk about India’s path to energy self-sufficiency and how from a geology perspective we actually have fantastic opportunity to become almost self-sufficient but certain things have got in the way but over a ten year period we can change almost everything. So, they are pessimistic, sometimes in the near-term but very few people are pessimistic in the long-term.

Q: How long-term should it be because the Prime Minister has in the past inevitably dismissed talks about India’s corruption, talks about India’s inflation as inevitable when a country is going through such rapid progress. Is that something your authors share? There are some things bad but inevitable when you are growing?

A: Several of the authors talk about corruption and how it affects the choices that are made in terms of the economy and they talk about what it might take to change those, for example our natural resource allocation process has been filled with corruption as we can see these days in many of the CBI and other probes that are going on but what they come back to is they said that several of our industries grew despite the corruption that was there, our potential for leapfrogging the technology can happen independent of corruption.

So, they do not gloss over corruption. They are just saying that we should not hide behind the issue of corruption and blame everything, all development problems on that. Many of our development problems have occurred because of choices that have been made or poor execution and that is not just corruption. So, the authors do not gloss over it. We have recognized it. I think everyone wants to get over it but they also think that many of the things can be done despite the corruption.