 You know, for anybody that's watching online right now from India, I'd also have to mention that you may feel a little bit lonely right now because I do believe almost every single citizen from India is in Washington, D.C. this week. We've got the delegation from the Ministry of Finance, the major health event that Kiran Mazumdar Shah and others were at yesterday at Carnegie. There's a civil aviation delegation, other members of parliament and such. So it's quite an India week, a tour de force here in Washington. And I think this day compared to a year ago, the mood is considerably more positive. Now the numbers, as we talk about the ACON relationship, are pointed exactly in the right direction where we'd like to see. U.S.-India trade is up by 4 percent. Foreign direct investment into India is up by about 40 percent over the last 12 months. And foreign institutional investment is up about 400 percent, so 4, 40 and 400. So directionally that's terrific. But is that the level that it could be? And what are the kinds of things that we should be working on to try to pick that up to a new level? And what's the impact? Why is it that we're trying to work on policy reform and increasing investment in trade? And that's what we're going to talk about today. And to talk about that and to help frame it, we're going to look at three of the major initiatives the Modi government has been talking about, skills development. How can we grow if there's not enough people ready to take those jobs if and when they become available? Smart cities. And lastly, make in India. What's the prospects of this major campaign the Modi government has initiated? To get the ball rolling today, let me start by welcoming and introducing up to the lectern Dr. John Hamry. You know Dr. Hamry is president and CEO of CSIS since January 2000, served before coming here in several senior roles at the U.S. Department of Defense. Lastly is the deputy secretary of defense. And I'd also say that he is a bit of an entrepreneur at heart as well. I joined CSIS just a year ago. And I find that what he brings to this place so far, looking for the great ideas that the staff come up with and trying to leverage technology and every tool available to try to promote those ideas. So I think he'd have done a pretty good job next to Dr. Wadwani in Silicon Valley because he's really got the heart of an entrepreneur and it's a pleasure to work here. So Dr. Hamry? Thank you, Rick. Thank you. No, no, no. You know, Rick started off by saying that he was impressed by the weight and the gravity of the people who are here today. Well, I represent the weight and you all are the gravity and I can hardly wait to hear what you all are going to say. I'm going to learn a lot from you. Thank you very much for coming. First, before we begin, when we have public events like this, we always begin just with a little safety announcement. Nothing's going to happen. I'm here to guarantee that. But I'm also the responsible safety officer. So I'd ask you to follow my directions. If I ask you to do something, the exits are going to be right here. We're going to go out. The stair is right to my right. We're going to go out and across the street to the Beacon Hotel and out by drinks for everybody. So we're going to be fine. So don't worry, but do follow me if anything does come up. Let me say, you know, the secret motto of every think tank is, oh, no, no. It's much worse than you think. I mean, we make a great living off of doom, you know? And I think I've got three other conferences going on here at CSIS right now, and they're about some dire, terrible thing that's going on. I'm so glad that we can have a conference where we're talking about opportunity, when things are buoyant and getting better. And that's the case. This is what's happened. I think Prime Minister Modi's arrival has really transformed the landscape. It's given a sense of energy and lift and direction at a time when we need it. India needs it, of course. America needs it. I think we're needing opportunities to look at Asia in a different way. And everything right now is very dynamic in Asia, as we know. We're finally at the stage to move the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I think the President will submit the trade promotion authority sometime this week. We have, of course, our friends in China that are promoting a new infrastructure bank. And that has ignited a great deal of interest. And I think that we're starting to see, finally, India standing up and taking a much larger role. It should. It's such a powerhouse, but it's been undervalued, underweighted in the national stage, the national landscape. I think that's now changing. We're going to get into that today. We're going to discuss that today. And I'm very glad that all of you will be a part of that. Assistant Secretary Kumar, we welcome you. We thank you for being here. We thank you for your leadership at the Commerce Department. You're going to be leading the strategic dialogue later this year. And we're very, very proud of that. And look forward to having a chance to hear you. So let me just, I will quickly get off the stage, but want to say thank you. I'll be back with you periodically. I do have to go off to my three doom and gloom conferences right now to say something inspiring to them. But I do want to say how grateful I am to all of you that we have something that we can do. We have things we can build. And that's what this conference is going to be about. Now let me, my real role today is to introduce to all of you Ramesh Wadwani. I have my time in knowing Ramesh, this remarkable man is only about four years and maybe four and a half years ago and one person brought us together who we all know as Siddhartha Shadoy. If ever you want an optimist in life, talk to Siddhartha. And Siddhartha introduced me to Ramesh. Ramesh has been active in building a better world for many years, not only for himself, it's a remarkable success as an entrepreneur, but he's converting and using his personal wealth to build good things for the rest of the world and especially for India and America. And I must say it's an inspiration. I'm very grateful. He's on my board. He's a challenging director on my board. But he makes me do a better job every day and we're delighted that he's here today to open this conference. Ramesh, would you please come up? Thank you for being here. Well, it's wonderful to be here and to see all of you. As you know, the economic agenda between the US and India is now in the forefront as it should be, but it has not been for the last many, many years. So finally, I think we are taking the right steps in the right direction. And I think it'll be great for both countries as we will learn today. Just by way of background, I want to thank both the CSIS and the Anand Center for helping to organize today's event. And obviously the pace of today's event will pick up towards the afternoon, starting with the bar at five o'clock, but working backwards, Finance Minister Jetli's presentation at 4.30, which will be the pre-bar celebration. The mission of the Vodwani Foundation is to accelerate economic development in the emerging economies with a particular focus on India. And we've had this mission for over 10 years when the foundation was started and I'm giving essentially all my wealth and my net worth back through the Vodwani Foundation. And our focus in accelerating economic development is primarily through entrepreneurship, small business growth, and skills development. So we have large scale initiatives in each of these areas. The scale that we are building is growing from the hundreds to the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. And now for the first time, we feel somewhat confident in talking about strategies and plans to affect the lives of millions. We've started in India, but a few months ago, about a year ago, we also launched initiatives in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. And before the end of this year, we would like to kick off similar initiatives in entrepreneurship, skills development, and related areas in three African countries. So we're in the process of selecting them. We have to build a staff. Because we are trying to do things at scale, it's very difficult to work with NGOs in India, because many of them are unable to scale at the rate at which we need them to scale. So we have a combination. We have a full-time staff of 100 people, and we also work with half a dozen of the better NGOs in India to achieve this kind of scale. I met Prime Minister Modi in September in New York when he was here. And I came away, it was about an hour meeting, very, very engaged, even though he had 12 advisors on his side. The conversation was entirely 100% between him and me. And that's good, in the sense that he knew absolutely what he was talking about, and he was completely in command of the subject. It did seem to suggest that there wasn't very much oxygen for anyone else in the room. But it was a great conversation. And I came away with the impression that, first of all, he's very strongly pro-business. Secondly, that he's extremely high energy. Thirdly, he's willing to take risks and make commitments that previous Indian administrations have been unwilling to do. And fourthly, that he completely understands the importance of foreign direct investment and the engagement of the US business community as a critical success factor in driving job creation and skills development in India. So in his mind, as it should be, these are very tightly connected together. One of the thoughts that I left him with, which he wasn't aware of previously, is that in a recent seven-year period, India had GDP growth of 40%, not surprising, right? 67% a year, seven years, cumulatively 40%. But job growth was 1%. So we only created 2.7 million net new jobs in India during that same period. That means there's clearly a huge disconnect between economic planning for GDP growth and economic planning for job growth. Now, in the US, that disconnect, first of all, is much less. But even if it was large, it would be okay because the base employment is so large as a percentage of the population. In India, particularly in the organized sector, the need for job growth to be more or less equivalent to GDP growth is absolutely paramount, but on the other hand, is not the case. So the whole point of my discussion with him was around the kinds of strategies and initiatives that are required to fix this enormous gap. Even today, today's newspapers, for example, talk about the fact that Chinese growth will be 6.5% a year. India's GDP growth will be 7.5% a year. If India's GDP growth of 7.5% a year is similar to qualitatively, what it was over the last seven or eight years, it means that job growth will lag significantly behind. And I think that would be catastrophic. Now, when Finance Minister Jetli talks this evening, he will be talking about the importance of India's demography and youth being translated into a dividend rather than a disaster, but it could go either way. And if you don't have enough focus on job creation and skills development, India's demographic growth could actually be a disaster. On the other hand, if India does things right, if the US business community takes advantage of that opportunity, it could very much be a demographic dividend, which is, of course, what we are hoping for. So there are a number of key initiatives. There's the whole idea of job growth planning, simultaneous with GDP planning and connecting the dots, which has not been the case before. There's the acceleration of entrepreneurship to create millions of new jobs. There's the need for innovation and small business so we can add another 10 million jobs. There's skills development because sometimes the availability of skills is in itself a job creator because of the cause and effect relationship. So helping to skill 25 million people over the next five years, that's going to be a very important growth driver. But ultimately, India is going to have to connect the dots between creating 25 million new jobs over the next five years and filling those 25 million jobs with very high quality human capital. Now, for large businesses in the US, that may raise the question of why do we care? And the answer is you should care very much because this is exactly what opens up the opportunity for foreign direct investment in India. So I was in India in February. I met four of the key ministers in Prime Minister Modi's government and I came away with three impressions. The first is they're energized. So whereas the ministers in the previous cabinet were essentially half asleep and half unsure about what their future would be. Here I had the feeling that these guys, these ministers were feeling strongly pressured by the Prime Minister to work long hours, do good things and actually be measured by outcomes and not just by words, which again has been part of India's history. So the sense of energy was actually quite energizing for me as well. The second thing is that many of them are starting to think about initiatives that will make a difference. And the third is each of the four of them indicated a strong desire to work with US business because they realize that between the US government and US business, that's where the magic of the relationship lies between US and India. It is not just government to government. And on the business side, there are lots of opportunities in India. So one very good example is the make in India initiative where the Prime Minister and a number of his other ministers are committed to expanding manufacturing. But in consideration for that, they're also beginning to open up investment rules that will make it easier to invest in India. So it started in the insurance industry. There's been progress in the defense industry. And I think progressively you will see a lot of progress on the relaxation of the regulations that I think hurt the performance of the Manmohan Singh government. Similarly, the Smart Cities initiative, great opportunity for innovation, great opportunity for US companies and companies from other countries to invest in India. And through a combination of initiatives like make in India, Smart Cities, innovation, entrepreneurship, I think we can achieve the best of both worlds which is great business opportunity for American companies and job creation and skills development in India. So what could be better than that? And that's the spirit of today's conference. And of course, we're all looking forward to what Finance Minister Jetli has to say, but I think you will find his remarks in some ways, you know, we'll cover, we'll focus on this particular topic. One final word, the Badwani Foundation has, as you know, funded a policy chair at CSIS. This is of course, Rick is the policy chair and Rick has been a key organizer of today's event, but we are also building up towards a major leadership event in September or October this year. It will be in Washington DC. And at that particular event, we hope to have perhaps 50 to 100 of the key policymakers from the US and an equal number of policymakers from India, including critical ministers of Prime Minister Modi's government, as well as a number of chief ministers and their secretaries and their staffs, so that through this very active and engaged dialogue, we'll be able to move these initiatives forward at faster and faster speed. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Ramesh. Now it gives me great pleasure to introduce the chair of our other co-organizer for today's proceedings, Mr. Tien Ninen. For those of you that have bothered to read any kind of business or econ article in the Indian press, he probably wrote it, so I can very much leave that part of a journalistic experience at that, but also chairing the Ananta Center. Ananta Center, of course, does events covering a very wide range of different topics, the arts, the sciences, but also business. And so having such an astute business journalist leader of the organization, they've proven to be exactly the right kind of partner for this type of event. So apart from his work with Business Standard, apart from his work with the Ananta Aspen Center, he also is chosen by his peers frequently to help lead their work as well. So he's president of the Editors Guild of India, chairman of the media committee at CI, and a variety of other roles, kind of proving that indeed, you know, his leadership in the industry, his leadership on business issues has been critical and important time. So Mr. Ninen, please, I welcome you to the lectern. Thank you, Rick, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for that introduction, and thank you also for helping to engage with this partnership and to take it forward and develop it in new ways. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Humry and Mr. Adwani for the role they're playing and the leadership and drive they're giving to building this partnership, to doing events like this, and partnership with the Ananta Center as well as with India and the US as a whole. The, I won't take long, but I do want to say that the new government has created a sense of purpose and therefore there is energy, both domestically at home and in international relations, particularly in the bilateral relationship with the US. Everybody knows that this is a unique bilateral relationship, not just specifically because it's not just government to government, it's not just business to business, it's also people to people, and there is no other bilateral relationship which has all three elements as strong as they are. Within government to government, we have an astonishing number of sectoral dialogues that go on, the last count I think was 40 or thereabouts, in everything ranging from trade and investment to defense and security, science and technology, cyber security, space, agriculture, education, clean energy, you name it. And then on top of those 40 sectoral dialogues, we have interministerial consultations, so there is a range to this relationship which is quite unique. We do need to build depth as well. Bilateral trade is about $100 billion and the president and the prime minister have agreed to try and take this up to $500 billion. That's an ambitious target, but I think the fact that the government in India has launched a whole series of initiatives does create opportunity. And the international diplomacy that Mr. Modi has launched is specifically focused on also creating a link to his domestic agenda. And the obvious example is the focus on building the physical infrastructure in the country and things like the railways where he's looking for partnerships with China, with Japan, with France most recently. He's looking at building a manufacturing base and he's opened up on direct investment for defense and of course on insurance a little more. He's looking for partnerships in urban development and creating smart cities. He's got a hugely ambitious program in clean energy. He's taken the target for 2022 for solar energy from 20 gigawatts to 100 gigawatts, which is astonishing. And then he's taken up the target for wind energy to 60 gigawatts. One, this makes a huge difference to India's ability to talk in the climate change negotiations multilaterally to it creates opportunity for bilateral initiatives, trade, investment, and so on. So I think it's a good time for India and the US to be talking across a whole range of issues. We are now more or less acknowledged by the fund, the bank, and almost all international observers as being the fastest growing economy in the world, overtaking China. It doesn't say very much when the Chinese economy is four times our size, but at least you begin to start showing some real momentum. The Swadwani spoke at length on several issues and all of his comments are very pertinent and relevant. I do have a slightly different view on the employment question, which is that if one sees it in purely macro numbers, the net addition to the workforce each year is about 8 million. Now, that sounds like a very large figure, but the overall workforce is 480 million, so the actual growth is about 1.6%. Now for an economy growing at 7%, it's not that difficult to create 1.6 million growth in employment. And then if you leave our diet culture, which is half, and say all the growth has to come in non-agriculture, which is what it is, even then the growth in employment has to be only 3% a year. And it's not, it is a challenge and it is a daunting task, but it is not the impossible task that very often people portray it as. I think the fact that we are looking at creating a manufacturing base is central to this challenge that our manufacturing sector is only what, 17% of GDP. That's not, I think it's also important to recognize what the international comparisons are that Brazil's share of manufacturing and employment is 17%. Russia's share of manufacturing and employment is 17%. So the only BRICS country, which is an outlier, is China, which is way out. And then there are several East Asian economies which are tied into the Chinese manufacturing base, which are about 24, 23%. So it's not that we've completely failed in manufacturing, but it is true that the opportunities are enormous, that our own policies have held us back and there is no reason why we cannot be like the East Asian countries and now 25% of our GDP come from manufacturing, which is the official goal. So with a sense of purpose across the government, with ministers under pressure from the prime minister to be seen to be delivering and doing things and with the macroeconomic picture improving in every way possible, the fiscal situation, I don't know what Mr. Jettli will say in the afternoon, but if you take the central and the state fiscal deficits combined, all the focus has been on the fact that the central deficit is what it is and that it's under control and it's fine, but it's difficult to try and shrink it further in the way he's looked at it. But you need to look at the gross national deficit, which is the central government and the state governments. And if you do it that way, this is one of the most significant corrections we've done in our fiscal picture because the transfers to states is substantial and despite that, the center's kept its deficit under control, so there is very real fiscal correction that's happened. Monetary policy is responding, the inflation rate is down, the counter-count deficit is under control, fortunately because of the oil price situation. So the macroeconomy is under control and there is new energy taking place. And if in the course of this new financial year for us, which runs from April to March, we're actually able to see investment pick up, which I expect will happen towards second half of the year. We will be well on our way. So I think the context for the subject of this seminar today on building the bilateral relationship is that India is very well poised to be taking those initiatives and I'd like to close those comments and thank everybody present for being here to say we are delighted from the Ananta Center to be here as a partner in this with CSI, the Monetary Foundation, and look forward to this deliberation. So thank you very much Rick.