08 Sep 2022
On 23 September 2007, as India was celebrating 60 years of Independence, Professor C K Prahalad, a leading management specialist of his times, shared a vision for India@75 and presented a future-facing development blueprint for the country. Realizing the importance of developing such a vision for India’s inclusive growth, CII stepped in to help catalyse its realization. A pan-India visioning exercise was undertaken through a consultative process that involved over 5,000 people from all walks of life to build a consensus on the India@75 vision and map it to people’s aspirations.
This granular exercise resulted in the creation of 17 State vision documents and 23 City Development Plans, which collectively evolved as a vision document for ’India@75 – The People’s Agenda.’ The comprehensive document included a roadmap for achieving its objectives by 2022.
In many ways it was an audacious vision, as it was the first ever 15-year plan that aimed for ‘exponential growth as opposed to incremental growth’. Importantly, it called for innovative and disruptive approaches to break away from the status quo of simply emulating the ‘Best Practices’ and move to ‘Next Practices’ with the guiding factor and ethos of collaboration by all stakeholders for sustainable growth. At the crux of the blueprint was Industry leadership that had played an important role in India’s growth story post liberalization.
CII took the vision to different stakeholder groups and advocated for its collective ownership. Several goalposts in the vision found traction with the Government over the subsequent years. Most noticeably, skilling was taken up by the Government on priority in 2008. The result was setting up of the National Skill Development Council and Corporation, with support from CII. The India@75 vision was widely accepted and inspired many Government schemes including PM Kaushal Vikas Yojana, Smart Cities and Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana. The India@75 campaign led to many collaborations and partnerships with Industry at the forefront. CII internalized the vision and set up an institutional mechanism – the India@75 Foundation, to work deeply on the subject and deliver the vision objectives.
For CII, a notable outcome has been setting up of the CII Centres of Excellence (CoEs) which accelerated over the last decade. Today, CII has 10 Centres of Excellence that support businesses in areas ranging from quality management and energy efficiency to water management, logistics and agriculture.
Volunteering and pro-bono engagement of corporates and professionals in social issues have been some of the thrust areas of the India@75 movement. Enthused with the experiential learnings of drawing the vision and implementation roadmap for India@75, the India@75 Foundation and CII collaborated with the Ministry of Culture to evolve the vision for India@100. The visioning exercise for India@100 has identified 14 focus areas that capture the aspirations of people, especially youth, empowered with technology and with a high achievers’ spirit. It has been proposed that the 25-year vision will have milestones every 5 years for revalidation and mid-course correction for alignment with evolving national priorities.
CII is also organizing pan India conferences – the Sankalp Se Siddhi – series of conferences to converge the leaders from the Government, Industry, and other relevant stakeholders to come together and share the important features that should feature in the Vision Document for India@100.
The India@100 vision will aspire for a sustainable Morally, Economically and Technologically Advanced (META) India by 2047. As we work with the Government and other stakeholders for India@100, CII would further intensify the role of the industry for national development and inclusive growth.
This article was contributed by Mr Rajan Navani, Chairman, CII India@75 Council and Vice Chairman, Jetline Group of Companies and was first published in CII Communiqué August 2022 Issue.