 And we all understand quite well that entrepreneurship is what is going to create jobs for the future in India and specifically startups. And I am very glad that the reach out is happening today so that you know we can get the views of the public and really understand what is important for everybody and try and implement it in the government because at the end of the day youth is what is going to drive India and it is very important to hence support entrepreneurship in India and startups as well. I think it is an excellent initiative, such an informal chat conversation, listening to a mass group of people about startups and entrepreneurs, I think we will go a long way in giving confidence to people that people are in power of this job. Thank you for inviting me here. I have come here more as a listener, I am not a technical expert, I have come here to listen to you to get a sense of what you are feeling. And how we can work together to make entrepreneurship easier to help you build startups. I mean I am happy to take whatever questions you would like to throw at me. I think you will be taking care of that aspect. I am pretty excited to be here so let us get moving. My question to you is I will read it out please. When I signed up for today's session many people told me that why do I associate politics with work? However startups and non-profit organizations like ours should be interacting more with politics and government and it should not be a bad perception. How will you change this perception? How will you motivate startups and people who currently do not believe in politicians and that they are there to help them and prove them otherwise? Thank you. I have politics at home as well. And politics at work, politics at home. So the first thing is there is politics everywhere. There is politics in your office, there is politics in the environment in India. So you cannot escape a political conversation. For us it is important that we understand all the stakeholders in the country, multiple different stakeholders. So I think a conversation informs us what you would like and from our perspective I think what is important is that we listen carefully and we try and of course it is eventually going to be a compromise. We are not going to be able to do everything you tell us but we have a sense of what you are looking for, what other stakeholders are looking for so we can get a positive solution. You basically without talking to the political system you will not be able to do what you are trying to achieve. It is impossible in India because the political system controls a hell of a lot of this country. So I think that is... Thank you so much. But to me I do not think that people listen enough. I think people speak a lot, tell their opinions but I do not think people listen. I think listening is a very powerful thing. So I intend to listen. Thank you sir. And then I think what is also very important is that when you say something it is credible. So when you just come in and you say 50 different things and you end up doing nothing that is not my style. So you might hear me saying two things but I guarantee you if I am saying two things here it is going to be done. My name is Apramya. I used to run taxi for sure. Now I run vocal. I am also an angel investor. Some of my companies which I invested in have been getting notices asking them to pay tax on the amount that has been invested by us. This is with the assumption that we have not paid tax already. So that is almost assuming that I have evaded tax and treating me like a criminal through the eyes of the startup that I have invested in. So an honest tax paying citizen like me and so many others who are trying to invest in startups when will all of these people be treated with the respect that they deserve and how would you ensure it sir? I think I have been informed about the angel tax and I think angel tax goes counter to the philosophy of startups. So I said I will say one or two things here. We are going to get rid of this tax. When we come to power we will track on it and you can call me on that one. We will connect you to Apramya. If you want to look at pretty much any big jump that India has taken, green revolution, white revolution, liberalization, telecoms, computers, it is always about breaking a monopoly. There is always if you look carefully you will always find that there is a monopoly that has been broken that has resulted in the step change and currently there is a massive monopoly on our banking system. If you look at the names, Mr. Neerav Modi, Mr. Mehul Choksi, Vijay Malia, Anil Ambani, these names, Mr. Neerav Modi takes 35,000 crores, 35,000 crores that is the equivalent of one years of Narega money, takes it, runs away to London and what does he give back? How many jobs has Mr. Neerav Modi given this country? Almost nothing. So our entire structure, banking structure is captured and controlled by very, very few limited numbers of people and I think one has to transform that, one has to change that, one has to make banking capital, of course they have a place because businesses have a place but they are not going to be producing the jobs. The jobs are going to be produced by small and medium businesses, by entrepreneurs. That's a fact. If you look at job production, it comes when small and medium businesses become big businesses and it comes from this type of ecosystem. So opening up the banking system to entrepreneurs, to small and medium businesses, aggressively that's something that is fundamental. And I think the first part of his question is what programs do you wish to put forward that would help his community? I think in terms of Dalit entrepreneurship, in terms of those that are socially less well off. I mean, do you mean social programs or you mean specifically? Entrepreneurship he's asking about specifically. I mean, I think helping them with the banking system, helping them with training systems, helping them setting up hubs and connected areas where they can have easy access, where they can come in and start their businesses easily, connecting the skills of the country to the financial system to the government system. If you want, apart from everything else that is going on, you sense a anger in Indian society. You sense a tension in Indian society and that tension and anger is there because India is failing on jobs and government doesn't like to say it, but the fact of the matter is this country is dramatically, disastrously failing on jobs. And we can keep making excuses. We can keep saying that we're a superpower and we're all this. But India is simply not competitive when it comes to making jobs. And this is something that India will have to first accept. And after you accept it, you can do something about it. You look at our entire conversation. It is always about growth. We grew 7%, we grew 6%, we grew whatever we did, but nobody says this quarter, this is how many jobs were added. Nobody is focusing on the critical metric of jobs. And there is only one group of people who can solve this job problem. And it is small and medium businesses and entrepreneurs. Now the second thing, the second massive disconnect that we don't talk about, there are traditional hubs of skill. And you can see them all over Karnataka, you can see them all over India. You know the names. You know there's Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, there's Bangalore as a tech hub, there are multiple hubs of different skills. And we have an attitude where we don't really value them. We don't think that the skills that are embedded, for example in Kanpur or in Mirzapur, I'm talking about UP or in Bangalore, these skills are what is important. So what we do is, we don't link our system to those skills. If you go, if you look at the success of the Chinese and I'm absolutely convinced that our single biggest challenge is to take them on and actually do better than them and I'm convinced we can do it. What they have done at scale is they have taken their skill networks, their traditional old skill networks and connected them to their financial network, connected them to their infrastructure. So we have to think in terms of where are the skills, who are the people with skills and breaking monopolies and also making sure that we have a single-minded focus that if we do not start to create the jobs that we need, we're sitting on a disaster, the size we cannot even comprehend. So I want to bring a sense of urgency here because we always like to talk about the successes and there are many successes, all of you are successful. But country the size of India, the scale of India simply needs to be producing jobs at a massive scale and we're failing them. When we say jobs, we say we're thinking about formal jobs but the nature of India is that there are many, many, many informal jobs and you cannot ignore those informal jobs and one of the things that I think has tremendously damaged this country is the notion that the current government has that the informal sector is ineffective, useless, needs to be changed. The informal sector is actually the backbone of India and the informal sector it really is and the informal sector needs to be transformed not with shock therapy gently but the informal sector also needs to be protected in that you can't just one day get up in the evening and say listen we're now going to detonate the entire informal sector by getting rid of the 500 and the 1000 rupee note, you just can't do that and you've literally wiped out over a crore jobs last year because of this type of policies. Newspapers don't write about this, newspapers have their own reasons for not writing about this but some of the policies that the government is carried out demonetization the way they've implemented GSE have been absolutely disastrous on jobs connecting the education system to the business ecosystem bridging the universities with business there's no other way to do it there's a today our universities and even the best ones their silos they teach very well but not connected networks they are silos so you can't for example access our universities and then have conversations about building businesses you can't have that type of a conversation so a modern university at 21st century university is a network it's no longer a concrete silo so opening up these universities making sure that the right type of people are leading these universities giving these universities independence frankly the the current dispensation is placing ideological people at the head of these universities so there's no way there's no way you're going to you're going to do that you're going to fix that problem but turning giving license to our university basically trusting them saying listen we trust you get on with it we're not going to disturb you get to work talk to business people that is a the general approach of the government the starting position is distrust I don't trust you so the first thing you've got to say okay no actually we're gonna we're gonna trust you we're gonna go ahead and trust you and make a mistake then we'll see so the attitude requires a shift but moving moving opening some of these these structures how do you create more entrepreneurs in the villages who can go on to create many jobs I think the jobs crisis that we have is a structural systemic crisis and it needs to be solved in a very very fundamental way and we believe that entrepreneurship and and enabling youth to become entrepreneurial and what we call as mass entrepreneurs in creating more jobs is the key so the question I have for you is I want you I want to visualize a young lady so I represent the voice of around 10,000 youth across 11 states that we work with the point is there's a young lady 21 years of age who's completed a graduation in a village in Sindhanur Taluk in Raichur and she's saying where are the opportunities for me how do I go on to dream of the socioeconomic status of an entrepreneur and how do I feel empowered enough to make those choices what's your thought for that girl out there and how what would you do to empower that young woman to go on to be an entrepreneur I mean first of all I think they're entrepreneurs all over India I mean I go to poor you know villages in Uttar Pradesh some brilliant work going on there right but the problem is not that the skills don't exist or the idea that a lot of people have is that you know we need to skill people skills are there there's no shortage of skills in India you might need a fine-tuning that you need to do to the skill to bring him into into a corporate situation but there's no there's no limit to the skills that this country has we don't actually utilize the skill we don't actually give access to the skill I'll give you I'll give you a small example right just of the of the cuff we think about vocational training and we say listen we are going to set up a ITI and now we are going to train let's say carpenters and so you have somebody training a whole bunch of carpenters that's the current way of thinking about training well there are millions of carpenters in this country there's a network of carpenters in this country they know how to do carpentry why don't you use them to train carpenters why don't you say to them that listen you understand how carpenters are trained go to every carpenter and say listen you please train three carpenters or five carpenters and then have a system of certification of carpenters and say every time one of the carpenters you've trained get certified we give you 100 rupees in your bank account you'll train unlimited number of carpenters point I'm making is that we there are skills networks in this country millions of millions of people who absolutely understand what has to be done but the system doesn't really reach out to them and say okay listen you have the skill now help us train have you ever heard for example the government of India saying to carpenters or barbers listen we want you to now become an army of trainers I've never heard it said so there is a there is a sense in our mind that skill is something that is centralized and that has to be handed out to people no there is skill all over this country is decentralized it's operating right now you have to you have to link you have to enable that guy right and what is Bangalore if you look at it right everybody says Bangalore is basically a particular type of skill that was built up over a long period of time and then that skill connected to the United States and the rest of the world that's basically what is created modern Bangalore so what we do with Bangalore what we did with Bangalore is what we have to do with other people other hubs of skill there's no there is no reason I mean when you look at for example a China town in China that produces 90% of the locks that are being sold in the world what they've essentially done is connected a traditional network of skills with money to the rest of the world and built the whole value chain that's what we we can do it easily but we have to we have to change our mindset to one of growth only you got to say okay now let's start producing millions and millions of jobs how do you do that you can't do it without the skills so then the next step obviously is find the people start building those connectivity those those networks and the thing builds fire we've had successes huh for example Bangalore's a huge success if you if you look at if you look at what everybody calls the white revolution Amul it is basically connecting a large number of women in a district of Gujarat called Anand 70 years ago that produced Anand and created you know made India number one milk producer so when you reach out to the skills it happens but that's not our default position in India generally people don't respect skills the starting position is they respect power they don't respect skills everybody says oh you know China's 10 XRs 20 XRs I don't believe them we are fundamentally different in China and you can't measure India the way you measure China so I'm not in a I'm not I don't believe that China is you know miles ahead of us or anything like that what China has done pretty well is build manufacturing systems on skills and formalizing it okay but India has tremendous tremendous capacity tremendous flexibility that China just does not have so you can't you can't build a 60,000 man factory in India because of the nature of our democracy and the nature of our of our ecosystem but let me tell you modern manufacturing is flexible manufacturing modern manufacturing is going to be small units with a lot of high-tech injected in them that is perfect for India so it is it is being open to some of these ideas look when you when you close your mind when you when you have an environment which is angry when you have an environment where there is tension anger viciousness you don't just close your mind you close the entire ecosystem right so what is happening today is India's liberal nature India's open system India's institutions are being attacked they're being suppressed so for us you have to be you have to have an open open ecosystem people have to be ready to talk people have to be ready to converse right that's for us that's the first step with a with a bad environment you're going nowhere on the on the specifics a manufacturing you got to build the basic infrastructure you got to build roads you've got to build the architecture that allows goods to be moved about GST in a in a proper form is is a is a good way forward so some of those things are happening okay so we have a question on women's entrepreneurship from Kajal Upadhyay is she here Kajal ah she's right here Kajal question I'm Kajal I'm an entrepreneur myself but my question is very different it is not about entrepreneurship as such it is about I just want to know why is everybody going around saying I don't know I mean look I'll tell you how I see it apparently now the whole country is a chokida that's what I last heard everybody's become a chokida but but let me tell you the facts okay and I'll go into a little bit of detail because it's important the Raphael contract is the biggest defense contract in the world it's the biggest defense contract in the world it was negotiated by the UPA eight years of negotiation it's a very technical contract eight years of negotiation and a couple of things were decided 526 corrodes for one aircraft the aircraft to be manufactured in India frankly in Karnataka right here with by HAL and and when you say when you say how do you think about competing in manufacturing well one way you compete in manufacturing is get one of the most high-tech products being created on the planet put it in Bangalore and then help or build all this in silly and silly reason around it that's how you do it right it was going to be built by HAL now we changed governments Mr. Narendra Modi become becomes prime minister and you can check this he goes to France with Mr. Anil Ambani on his delegation it's a fact government records check the contract is changed the defense minister turns around and says I have no idea how this happened he's at a fish market in Goa he says I have no idea how this have happened what we subsequently find is that the 526 corrodes aircraft has become a 1600 corrodes aircraft so 126 aircraft were to be bought now 36 aircraft are going to be bought but we're going to pay the same price and Mr. Anil Ambani suddenly edges into the contract now we're talking about skill here Mr. Anil Ambani got the world's biggest defense contract he's never built an aircraft in his life ever the company the company that got the contract we're talking merit here the company that got the contract was formed 10 days before the contract was given the French president publicly states that I was India I was told by the prime minister of India that the only way Dassault is going to get this contract is if Mr. Anil Ambani is given the contract and oh by the way don't pay 500 don't charge 526 corrodes charge 1600 corrodes Mr. the president of France says this and you can check the internet it's there we raise the issue I asked these four questions to the Prime Minister and Parliament House why did you give Anil Ambani the contract why 1600 corrodes what is Mr. Anil Ambani's experience this doesn't answer one and a half hours he looks down looks up looks left looks right doesn't answer doesn't look in the people's eyes and it's a fact please look at the please look at the tape he's standing there going like this like this like this like this he's not answering the questions okay the CBI chief turns down and says you know what I'm going to do I'm going to investigate remember one thing the Prime Minister placed that man there the CBI chief is removed sacked the Supreme Court comes and says bring him back he's brought back he's sacked again within a matter of hours now defense ministry documents have come in the Indian Hindu newspaper take a look at them there is a series of articles three or four articles it is the negotiating team writing in the documents and the negotiating team is saying Mr. Narendra Modi the Prime Minister of India has carried out a parallel negotiation with Rafael with the assault is the negotiating team the negotiating team is saying the Prime Minister of India has pushed us aside and the PMO is directly negotiating with the government of France and assault all we said was let's have an inquiry let's have a joint parliamentary committee let's check out what happened and the gentleman who says I am the Chaukidar here whose name has come in the defense minister papers the defense minister said I don't know anything about this the CBI chief has been sacked that gentleman turns around and says no inquiry no JPC nothing look it's a simple thing Mr. Anil Ambani was given 30,000 crores by Mr. Narendra Modi it's as simple as that and the case is open and shut because even those documents even those documents that are saying the Prime Minister is running a parallel negotiation if those documents become part of an inquiry Mr. Narendra Modi and Mr. Anil Ambani are going to jail it's as simple as that now my point is if the Prime Minister wasn't guilty he would immediately say absolutely let's do an inquiry 100% an inquiry should be done this is the biggest defense contract it's Air Force money I'm the Prime Minister of India I have done nothing wrong have an inquiry why is he not having an inquiry simple now my friends in the media these days they're pressurized they're controlled so they don't really like to talk about these things and I can give you a list of defense contracts that Mr. Anil Ambani and Mr. Modi's friends have been given one after the other and they only got caught on Raphael which happens to be the biggest contract in the world so that's why everybody is saying chalky that sure hey look they they attack the Congress Party they attack the Congress Party on corruption and we took action on corruption we sack people so fairness requires fairness requires that when so blatantly so publicly it is being said that corruption is taking place if the Prime Minister wasn't guilty he should have said listen I'm investigating this thing the people are responsible for this thing are going to jail that's what he would have done why is he not doing that you want to say something by the way another thing why does the Prime Minister not have conversations like this yeah say I'm happy to I'm happy to answer whatever you want yeah hello Mr. Rahul my name is Aditya and in reference to the explanation that you gave I want to tell you that the common Indian is stuck in a situation where the mainstream political parties who rule once and then switch parties some one party is accused of one scam and the others that's true that's absolutely true and you go ahead so at the end of the day these are acquisitions the opposition and other members unitedly took the Rafael deal to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said no that's not that's not what happened it's been no no no no that's not what happened one second let's be clear about what happened the Supreme Court said it is not our jurisdiction to decide on these matters it is the jurisdiction of the political class the put Supreme Court said do a JPC right that's not what happened so it is it is absolutely wrong to say that the Supreme Court said there should be no inquiry it did not say that one second after that documents were handed to the Supreme Court through the Hindu which clearly state depends ministry documents that Mr. Narendra Modi yeah we'll come to you that no let him let me that Mr. Narendra Modi personally negotiated the Dassault contract that's criminal by any measure that is criminally should go to jail for that it's simple there's no there's no confusion there it's black and white open and sharp what Mr. Gandhi if I may impose the prerogative of the moderator to get the topic back on entrepreneurship that would be great because we've got a few other I'm sorry I went along absolutely I mean I can see in the political environment you know it's a passionate thing but I would like a few of our entrepreneurs Anvita is there if she could ask a question about women's entrepreneurship and rural entrepreneurship and then I'll get a few more questions and we'll try and keep these quick please because we're running short on time mind more about rural entrepreneurship the question is what kind of policy interventions do you think would help better align rural entrepreneurs with the urban consumer urban demand and kind of help bridge the gap between I mean I think I think just making the an entrepreneur is an entrepreneur entrepreneur is somebody who's trying to use his utilize his skills to build a business I I think they're you know in India today people are moving rural urban and these systems are making so I think looking at it purely and saying this is a rural entrepreneur this is an urban entrepreneur is in itself a slight problem but if you're looking at the rural area then connecting the rural area to the city transforming our railway network works trans allowing rural people to move fast across India making sure that again the type of skills that they require the type of information that they need the you know what I spoke about giving them training giving them introducing them to people who have built businesses like yourselves bringing them into a conversation with the ecosystem that that type of stuff would help and then of course in government contracts and in other spaces helping them a little bit saying look you're you're sort of struggling against all odds so we will create little spaces for you to sell your products etc first of all I want to thank you for what you're doing for the country each one of you in your own way are working very very hard and trying to make this country successful so I'd like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you're doing I understand that you struggle I understand that you face an uphill battle and my doors are open for you in any way I can help you I don't promise you that I'll resolve everything you know that you bring to me but I will my intention will be there to try and help you I think as far as India is concerned we're on a very positive track there are very very powerful things that this country has its people its nature the way we deal with each other our technical capabilities so there is I'm pretty optimistic the only thing I would like to say is that a country which is divided a country which is angry a country which is fighting within itself is not going to be successful so you have to do your little bit so that this country comes down doesn't sort of have this sort of very angry angry feeling to it and we get back you know happily where we were and we move on thank you very much for coming thank you mr. Gandhi and I really loved the way the whole policies the data was communicated to Raul Gandhi I want to be you know I had been politically neutral so far but yeah this gives a little bit a good opinion about Rahul Gandhi even though after there's a lot of negative media about Rahul Gandhi with a lot of stuff but yeah he's the sort of a gentle man you can say thank you