Authors: Nandan Nilekani, Thomas L. Friedman
ISBN-13: 9780143116677, ISBN-10: 0143116673
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: February 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Nandan M. Nilekani is the co- chairman of the board of directors of Infosys Technologies Limited. Nandan is the recipient of several awards, including the prestigious Joseph Schumpeter prize for innovative services in economy, economic sciences and politics. He was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2006 and was named Forbes Businessman of the Year in 2007. Nandan received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1978.
A visionary look at the evolution and future of India by a preeminent business leader
India's recent economic boomsimilar in scope to that of the United States during the early 1990s or Europe's during the 1970shas triggered tremendous social, political, and cultural change. The result is a country that, while managing incredible economic growth, has also begun to fully inhabit its role on the world political stage. In this far-ranging look at the central ideas that have shaped this young nation, Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani offers a definitive and original interpretation of the country's past, present, and future.
India's future rests on more than simply economic growth; it also depends on reform and innovation in all sectors of public life. Imagining India traces the efforts of the country's past and present leaders as they work to develop new frameworks that suit India's specific characteristics and challenges. Imagining India charts the ideas that are crucial to India's current infrastructure revolution and quest for universal literacy, urbanization, and unification; maps the ideological battlegrounds of caste, higher education, and labor reform; and argues that only a safety net of ideasfrom social security to public health to the environmentcan transcend political agendas and safeguard India's economic future.
As a cofounder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, Nandan Nilekani has actively participated in the company's rise in the last fifteen years. In Imagining India, he uses the global experience and understanding he has gained at Infosys as a springboard from which to discuss the future of India and its role as a global citizen and emerging economic giant.
A fascinating window into the future of India, Imagining India engages with the central ideas and challenges that face the countryfrom within and as a part of the global economyand charts a new way forward for a nation that has proved itself to be young, impatient, and vitally awake.
The premise of this suave and unabashedly free market overview of the New India-the rising economic powerhouse-is that ideas lead economic and social policy rather than the other way around. It's not a consistently held position, however, as Nilekani, cochairman of the board of directors of Infosys Technologies (a leader in India's burgeoning IT sector), refers in the same breath to a longstanding (postindependence) antipathy to teaching English reversed by its economic advantage in a global market. Theoretical consistency aside, the author makes a bid for a centrist position in the globalization debate. His focus rests on India's particular domestic and international advantages in such areas as population, English proficiency and information technology. But there's little separating his take on India's recent past (hobbled by Nehru-era socialism) or best present course (embracing "globalization," seen as a harmonious and harmonizing amalgam of democracy, equal opportunity and resource access) from such neoliberal champions as Thomas Friedman (who supplies the foreword). Readers inclined to a free market perspective will find Nilekani eminently reasonable, if less than startling; those seeing it as antithetical to an equitable and sustainable future will meet a familiar frustration on nearly every page. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Foreword ix
Notes from an Accidental Entrepreneur 1
Part One India Reimagined
Ideas That Have Arrived 31
India, by its People 34
From Rejection to Open Arms: The Entrepreneur in India 57
The Phoenix Tongue: The Rise, Fall and Rise of English 77
From Maneaters to Enablers 95
Home and the World: Our Changing Seasons 119
The Deepening of Our Democracy 140
A Restless Country 164
Part Two All Aboard
Ideas in Progress 169
S is for Schools: The Challenges in India's Classrooms 172
Our Changing Faces: India in the City 195
The Long Roads Home 218
Erasing Lines: Our Emerging Single Market 242
Moving Deadlines 266
Part Three Fighting Words
Ideas in Battle 271
The Sound and the Fury: Our Biggest Fights 274
Jostling for Jobs 297
Institutions of Sand: Our Universities 315
A Fine Balance 334
Part Four Closer Than They Appear
Ideas to Anticipate 341
ICT in India: From Bangalore One to Country One 345
Changing Epidemics: From Hunger to Heart Disease 366
Our Social Insecurities: The Missing Demographic 385
The Forest for the Trees: India's Environment Challenge 404
Power Plays: In Search of Our Energy Solutions 428
The Network Effect 450
Conclusion: The Awakened Country 453
Acknowledgments 465
Notes 471
A Time Line of Key Events 481
Index 495