Modi Puts 200 CEOs In Problem-Solving Mode
Modi to CEOs: Solve India’s problems like you would in your own company.
The 200 young entrepreneurs who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi were asked to come prepared with innovative ideas for solutions to India’s problems.
“The big principle given to us was, don’t come up with things that we all know,” said Sumant Sinha of solar and wind power producer ReNew Power. CEOs were given specific subjects and were asked to come up with presentations, said Sinha, among the CEOs who attended the event. The government is looking for “big implementative ideas that could be transformative in nature”.
Speaking to the young CEOs at the two-day ‘Champions of Change’ seminar organised by the NITI Aayog, Modi asked them to turn “development into a mass movement” to build a ‘New India’ by 2022.
The Prime Minister, finance minister and other Union ministers listened to the ideas that CEO presented with “rapt attention”, said Deep Kalra of online travel company MakeMyTrip. “The government was genuinely seeking views on interesting and real topics.”
The subjects ranged from jobs creation, doubling farmer income by 2022 to even poverty alleviation.
Giving consumers the option to choose their own power suppliers was one of the Sinha’s ideas. Another one was creating clusters of large renewable energy projects anchored around offshore wind energy.
“This will allow us to generate huge amounts of power in a non-land intensive manner” which can be used to supply power to coastal cities like Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, Sinha said. Electrifying all households by 2022 is also a stated mission under ‘New India’.
So how would young CEOs help the government solve India’s issues? “We were asked to solve the problem just as we would solve one for our own businesses,” said Kalra.