 Good morning. Good morning again to all of you. I'm Raja Mohan, the Director of Carnegie India. This is the sixth International Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that was set up about a century ago in 1910 to be precise. There are other centers in Moscow, in Beijing, in Brussels, in Beirut. It was beyond, besides Washington, D.C. So this will be the sixth center. So delighted that so many of you have joined us this morning. So let me welcome you. Before I welcome Mr. Sunil Mithil and Ambassador Burns to come up, just a couple of words so that the short inaugural session will be followed by two panels, one on innovation and Indian development, followed by India and the major powers. And then we have the release of Dr. Teles' paper on India's leading power, and we'll end with a keynote from Foreign Secretary Dr. Jay Shankar. Now, I just wanted to say a couple of words about what we hope to do. Carnegie, as I said, was set up in 1910, and as Carnegie came of age in the interwar period, it was also a moment when India's own national movement was coming into life, and India was beginning to discover its own international context. In fact, many of India's founding fathers came of age in the interwar period, and a strong spirit of internationalism that pervaded the Indian national movement. In fact, every single idea in the world animated, influenced the different streams of Indian national movement, and you saw that in the way India reached out to the world immediately after independence. So I think the spirit of internationalism that Carnegie brings, coupled with India's own spirit of internationalism, rooted very much in the soil, in India's national interest, and India's own unique international experience. We hope that together we will produce, use this combination to generate and to influence the discourse in this country. So let me stop there and invite Mr. Sunil Bharti Mital, trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and also, of course, he's the chairman of the Bharti enterprises, and then Ambassador Bill Burns, a former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, and the president of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Please join, both of you, join me on the stage. So I'll ask Sunil to start the proceedings and say a few words about them. Good morning to all of you. It's indeed my proud privilege to welcome you all here this morning at the launch of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here in New Delhi. In fact, I'm delighted to see, finally, Naidili written on this board. It's taken us some years to put a flag out here in this part of the world. If you look at the Carnegie spread now across the world, this part, South Asia, in particular India, was the missing piece. And when I joined the Carnegie Endowment in 2007, it was my personal mission to see that one day we will get to have Carnegie Center here in New Delhi for the entire South Asia. I look forward to seeing Rajamon and his team developing this center into yet another powerful place for Carnegie scholars from around the globe to come and work in this very important sector. I would also like to see scholars coming from other South Asian countries to be a part of this center and produce some vital documents for the benefit of our government, for the society at large. Ashley will be releasing later on his paper on India as a leading power. The timing could have never been better than today when India is really making our presence on the world stage. The timing therefore is perfect that we get some some issued like Carnegie to come and start working here along with Indian government to endorse that very vital vision that India has of now being a major player on the world stage. At 7.3 to 7.6 percent growth rate predicted for the coming year, India is really the sole sweet spot of world economic growth. Brazil falling down this year to expected minus 2.5 percent, Russia at minus 0.07 percent, Europe growing at no more than 1.7 percent and the US also clicking at only about 2.5 percent. India will be the engine of growth and therefore to my mind a very very important player in still driving the otherwise slowing down growth engine of the world. India is also making a deep impact on the strategic issues on the globe. Our Prime Minister who was recently in the United States for the Strategic Nuclear Summit made some very important vital point around terrorism about abuse of nuclear weapons in the wrong hands and how we can all put our minds together to see that we make the world a safer place. Yesterday morning we had a chance to call on the Prime Minister. He was generous with his time. He spent over 40 minutes with him and some of the things that he mentioned to us for us to work forward precisely in the area of ensuring the nuclear safety in this region. Terrorism seeing how we can connect the youth towards more gainful employment rather than crossing the line and being the part of the jihadist movement all these issues were engaging his mind and our issues that Carnegie works very well with. I have personally seen the papers of Carnegie I've read through them on ISI on Afghanistan on terrorism the geopolitical issues and I can tell you they are world-class papers and I have no doubt that India as a whole will benefit from it. Ambassador Burns who is now the leading light and the president of Carnegie Endowment is well known to all of you here today. I'm delighted that he has taken the responsibility at Carnegie Endowment to take the work forward work that has been acidously put together by Jessica for many years. Jessica is also present with us here today in fact she works very closely with me to ensure that the India Center comes up as soon as possible. I will not take too much time this morning and hand over the mic to Ambassador Burns but let me say it'll be very very important for us to have your support and your generosity in moving the agenda forward for Carnegie Center in India and I have no doubt in the next few years we will make a mark here. Thank you. Well thank you very much Sunil and good morning everyone. It truly is an honor and a privilege to join all of you this morning for the launch of Carnegie India. This day as Sunil said has been a long time coming and it is the product of extraordinary effort and dedication on the part of many people. Carnegie's board of trustees especially Indian trustees Sunil Amital and Ratan Tata who had the vision and the drive to expand Carnegie's global platform to New Delhi and Pat House and other deeply committed member of our board and a wonderful friend who's traveled from California to be with us today. My predecessor as president Jessica Matthews who began this task with her own remarkable energy and commitment. Our Founders Committee led by ambassadors Frank Wisner and Nuresh Chandra whose generosity and partnership helped bring the vision of Carnegie India into reality and of course my terrific Carnegie colleagues in Washington and now in Delhi. I could not have asked for a better co-pilot than the brilliant and endlessly resourceful Ashley Tellis and I could not ask for a better founding leadership team here than our founding director Rajamohan and managing director Shivnat Thukra. More than a hundred years ago Andrew Carnegie looked out at the dawn of a new century and saw a world in profound transition. The rise of new powers, emergence of new technologies, a changing global economy and the prospect of conflict all loomed large. Full of a self-made man's sense of purpose and possibility Mr. Carnegie was not content to merely admire these transformations. He wanted to shape them. In a remarkable act of foresight and generosity he invested all of his wealth to establish nearly two dozen philanthropies around the world. Among them was the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Carnegie's mission for the endowment was as simple as it was ambitious to advance the cause of peace and international understanding. By many objective measures today's world is more peaceful and prosperous than Mr. Carnegie could have imagined and yet as we look out over the horizon we see a world order in flux replete with the kind of promise and peril that animated Mr. Carnegie's philanthropy. Everywhere you look the foundations of global order seem increasingly unsteady, upheaval in the Arab world, a Europe in crisis and the risk of great power collisions across the Asia Pacific. The intensity of these tremors is matched only by the transformational forces rocking the global economy, climate, cyberspace and other transnational domains. Keeping up with this rapidly transforming landscape is a central task for an institution like Carnegie and all those who care about the cause of peace. From its beginning the Carnegie Endowment was a global institution, a place that was less interested in amplifying directives from Washington that it was in bringing international perspectives to bear in Washington. Over the past couple decades in an effort to keep pace with accelerating globalization and deepen dialogue and research at key geopolitical fault lines, the Carnegie Endowment opened up centers in Moscow, Beirut, Beijing and Brussels and today we're delighted to open our sixth international center in New Delhi. As all of you know very well the 21st century in the 21st century no region will be more consequential for global order than the Asia Pacific. India's rise is among the most significant and dramatic features of that new landscape. The same is true of the strategic partnership with the United States. A partnership between two of the world's largest democracies, two of the world's largest economies and two countries that for the first time in history have a deep stake in each other's success. This is precisely why we decided to open Carnegie India. India plays a critical role in nearly every region and issue of consequence. From the future of democracy to nuclear non-proliferation, great power politics to climate and the impact of technological innovation on international affairs. Understanding India's perspectives will be essential to meeting these and other challenges head on. And this is why we fully intend for Carnegie India to be an Indian institution led by one of India's and the world's finest strategic thinkers Rajamohan and staffed by the most promising young Indian scholars and practitioners. Together they will focus their initial efforts on the political economy of reform in India, on India's foreign and security policy and on the role of innovation and technology in India's internal transformation and international relations. In each of these areas, Carnegie India will benefit from the perspective of other Carnegie centers just as our other centers will benefit from Carnegie India. Together the growing Carnegie platform can help thinkers and doers alike make better sense of an increasingly disordered world. Given how crowded and complicated today's international landscape has become, and given the profound stakes for global peace and prosperity, Andrew Carnegie's mission and animating purpose is more relevant and vital than ever before. I'm convinced that Carnegie India can make an enormously important contribution to realizing that mission in the Pacific century unfolding before us. I'm convinced that Carnegie India can add to India's already rich intellectual tradition. And I'm confident that if we can maintain the spirit of inquiry, independent thinking, and creativity that drove Mr. Carnegie and the work of his endowment, we can help transcend this moment of testing and contribute to a more peaceful and prosperous world. So thank you all very much again for joining in today's launch and in the many conversations and initiatives that will follow in the months and years ahead. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Bill. Thank you for those wise words and putting the Carnegie India in perspective. Thank you, Sunil, for all your support and encouragement. And we look forward to all our friends here, many of whom are sitting here, many of the supporters to do more and to work together to take this institution forward. So we're caught up with time, so we're going to end this session here. And I'm going to invite Shivnath to take charge of the next session. Shivnath is the Managing Director of Carnegie India and to look at innovation and Indian development. There's coffee and tea at the back. Those of you who want, you can always go back and get it. So let's move this along. And thank you. Please join me in giving a hand to Bill. Thank you, Raja. Thank you, Sunil. And thank you, Bill. May I take the opportunity to invite my three panelists? Like always, I have a panel of all three women. Anu Acharya of Map My Genome, Akhi Das of Facebook and Radhika Agarwal of Shop Clues. Please welcome on the stage. And please give them a round of applause. Two of them are entrepreneurs. And the third one is shaping public policy in the social media space from Facebook. Please come. Thank you all for being here and thank you, everyone in the audience, to join us for this first panel. The topic is termed innovation and Indian development. So I have two startup entrepreneurs and one person who works with one of the world's largest startups now, Facebook to shape public policy in India. I won't go through their bios. What I would do is to let them speak and let them take us through in the first five minutes or so for each one of you to tell us what's your entrepreneurial journey has been from an innovation perspective, using technology and now grappling with issues which will need some sort of a intellectual or analytical thinking to ensure that policies are going to enhance your business and not be an impediment. May I start with you, Anu? Certainly. Thanks Shivnath, first one. So I think my entrepreneurial journey started about 16 years ago. I think at that point the idea really was to be in a field that was intellectually stimulating, which was genomics. And I think it started with doing bioinformatics. It was a difficult field to begin with, especially in India because we didn't have human resources. So I think the idea really was to say, can we prove a point to the world that you can do as good innovation in India versus the rest of the world? So we started with that premise. We ended up creating products, but I think there are lots of lessons to be learned over the years. And I think we did multiple things like even acquiring companies outside of India, in the US, in Germany and the Netherlands. So there were lots of things that we learned from there, but I think by the time I came to the next startup, which is MapMyGenome, which is what we are doing today, I think the premise of doing something came up as a completely different problem to solve, which was a much larger problem to solve, saying, if you look at where healthcare is going today, and if we just follow the current traditional path, we will be able to come to a point where we'll be at a cliff. So the inspiration was different. The technology experiences was there, but was to be able to say if everything in the world is going to be normalized using, let's say, Caucasian data or anything in healthcare is going to be, if you're going to look at data that has been created by not for Indian people, then we are going to be, when we come towards personalized medicine, we probably won't have standards that are necessarily ours. So I think that was what the big problem we are trying to solve. And I think the challenge obviously was that you had a small data set to begin with, and you had to start competing with people with much lesser capital, with human resources that were limited. But I think the good thing is when you have a big problem to solve, and you have a team that's excited about it, you can still do that. So I think that's where we are today. Thank you, Anu. So from health sector to the consumer space, Radhika Agarwal is a co-founder of Shop Clues, and I think it's one of India's first unicorn in the marketplace investments. Unicorn being a billion dollar valuation company in the Indian marketplace, and she had some professional experience in the US as well. So Radhika, over to you. Thank you. What an honor to be here, firstly, guys. Thank you for having us. I think when we start, so we moved back to my career as she pointed out, that's probably a good place to start, spent most of my career in the US working with investment banking for a bit, and then in the retail space. Always had an eye open for India. There were a lot of changes that were going on. 1.3 billion population, 40 million small and medium enterprises, one third of them selling something for a living. I was sitting in the US working in the retail industry and always looking out at what changes were happening in India at that time. And it just seemed like a very exciting space. Our experience, the team's experience had been that retail in any country or online retail in any country resembles the offline retail. And in India at that time, none of the bazaars were online. Most of Indian population shops in these little strip malls in India, if you go out, you'd see the bazaars which are the sector markets or the Sarojini nuggers. And there was no initiative to bring these markets online because that's where the consumer was moving. Four years since, we have about 350,000 merchants. These are small merchants who sell on the platform. On a monthly basis, we get about 100 million visits on the platform. Most of these visits come in from the mobile phone. And we've just got started. We're shipping out about 3 million items on a monthly basis again. And when we look at the opportunity, it's huge, huge, huge. I think Prime Minister Modi said that one of the best things about entrepreneurship is that it converts job seekers into job creators. And I believe that in our own little way, that's one thing that we've been trying to do. For most of these small merchants who come in and sell on our platform, they land up hiding about three to four people just to run their digital aspect of their business. And that is one way. So 350,000 merchants and multiply that by about four people in each one of these little units. And that's about one and a half million people working just on the digital space on e-commerce right now. And this is just growing on a day to day basis. For us, retail is something that we do over the hood. But under the hood, what we've been working on is digitizing the small merchants business. So when you look at the merchants who sell on our platform, which is a very typical, small and medium merchant or micro small merchant who sells in the little stores in the Indian bazaars, 94, 95% of them don't even have a point of sale system. So they typically when you go buy something from them, they'll give you a paper invoice. Our goal is while we're creating the market for the Indian mass consumer, we also want to be able to digitize the entire business of the small and medium merchants. And that is where a lot of our effort is going. Just a quick question to the honorable Minister of State, Mr. Janssen, at practice in the in the morning, great initiatives by the government, you know, stand up India and start up India. In a lot of ways, I believe that what we are trying to do is bring the two of them together, create entrepreneurs who have a venue to be able to do their business. And the government can help us in a bunch of policies. But in a lot of ways, beautifully said by the Prime Minister at the startup India event, the best thing that the government can do actually stay out of the stay out of the business. And I think they're doing that wonderfully. And I hope they continue to do that as well. I don't know how many in this room from the industry would agree with that. But as long as the startup feels like that, why not start us feel like that. So startups don't see to the challenge. They see an opportunity. Health and consumer space and of course, technological innovation that spreading to one big chunk is financial technologies, the banking space, we have a few of the representatives on the financial services industry. But I was listening to yesterday, how fascinating I think IDFC is trying to do like this small pause machine is going into rural Madhya Pradesh and making that into an ATM and not really doing a traditional ATM. What that is going to lead to, and I'm going to come to you on this topic of what Nandan just touched about when Adha reached a billion mark. He said India today is home to the biggest data set in the world. We have a billion data points. It's not easy to collect billion data points. And it's just a tip because each of those billion people will end up doing something else. So that just keeps multiplying. Big data and artificial intelligence are key sounds a bit geekish right now, but this morning in the Wall Street Journal, I read a piece by Steve Case, who has pretty much predicted the path of digital technology as well, is that we're already into the fourth wave. So you saw basic internet, you saw services, you saw the apps riding on them. And now you're looking at internet permeating into every sphere. Social platforms are playing a critical role in connecting the small merchants and the kind of services that Adhika and Anu talked about. From a Facebook point of view, how is that space going to play out? I think most of our innovation investments are in three areas. I think it's laudable what Nandini talked about the other program and truly I think it's a giant program, but none of that is going to come to life without fixing the connectivity problem in India. I think there is no disagreement at the Uber level in terms of connecting India. The challenge starts is when you try and bring specific tactics to market, whether at the business model innovation level or even looking at things like spectrum sharing or just having a very linear approach here in India, which I think is inconsistent with the global model, where you look at spectrum pricing as the only way to sort of make more spectrum available, whereas the global model is a combination of strict rollout obligation as well as pricing. And I think we have not totally embraced those global models in terms of accelerating connectivity infrastructure. So unless you solve for that big problem, a lot of the stuff which is going to ride on that network is just not going to get accelerated at least the way we imagine that it would be. And I think it's important that groups like Carnegie, for instance, pick up this issue and really decode this and study this. What are the barriers to that actually getting realized? Because if you just keep on looking at targets, but if there's no scorecarding of that, then we will keep on having the same conversation two years from now, one year from now. And maybe you guys should take up this entire thing of doing a state of connectivity report at the end of 2016 and see what was promised and what is what realized because a lot of business model innovations, you know, and I can go on about this and nobody will go home, gets routinely tampered with in terms of either a public interest issue which people then get very agitated about or there is a kind of regulatory behavior which kind of looks at any business model innovation or any business model disruption with great deal of suspicion. And I think we as a country need to have the capacity to embrace innovation and embrace disruption in a big way because disruption is a core component of any innovative practices coming to coming to market. Yesterday I was at an internet association meeting and one thing which I learned from the e-commerce players is that they have now something which is known as entry tax which they have to pay in every state and something like 10 states have already come out with this particular instrument where e-commerce players, irrespective of foreign or domestic have to pay entry tax. So I think you are going to have these barriers of traditional mindsets on a regulatory side which is going to get imposed on a lot of these innovation markers and these markers behave differently, they work differently. Artificial intelligence you talked about that definitely is the future and we, I don't know if you saw it but we just announced there is this wonderful accessibility project which just got announced and actually got scaled out in terms of a rollout in a big way in the US. I'm hoping that will get scaled out very fast in international markets as well. This is essentially object recognition technology which is helping visually impaired people understand what's there in the photos in their news feed on Facebook earlier which they could not grasp in any shape or form. So I think artificial intelligence is going to get applied to driverless cars and a whole lot of innovation which is coming in auto, in healthcare, in education, et cetera. We are virtual reality is the next area where we are investing in a very big way but all of these areas are going to throw up massive disruptions, they're going to throw up massive requirements for data connectivity and unless we fix the connectivity infrastructure, a lot of these things are not going to land. I'm glad you raised the connectivity issue because that was one thing that Ambassador Burns and Ashley and I met, the Google head, he talked about that one basic, almost like a fundamental right in a country of a billion people, not more than two to 300 million internet connections is going to be limitation. Only just to circle back from the innovation point of view, Akhi talked about disruption. You've already caused a disruption in your industry. Can you give us a sense from an innovative disruption point of view, the kind of policy framework that surrounds your industry or what you're trying to do? How are the two playing out? So I think when it comes to just creating the what we want to build, I think that's a relatively easier task when you have a group of people who are well-trained or at least are completely diverse and are able to solve a problem. But I think when it comes to doing something like genomics in India, for instance, I think there are lots of other policies that sort of affect us in terms of just getting things to reagents to do things on time, for instance. I think the challenge has become that you are bucketed in the same sort of category as everybody else. And the challenge then becomes that when you are trying to solve something and you need to do this faster than anybody else, you shouldn't be having to go through the same, the hurdles of trying to get something in time because you just don't have other players, the raw materials are not there in India. So I think in terms of a lot of those kind of challenges that exist for every biotech company in the country, there are challenges in terms of exercise, customs, and various other things, which if we had people in India doing it, I think it was a perfectly fine thing. So those are some basic challenges. The second thing is about saying if you're doing research, there are a lot of laws in India and China which might be perceived both as good and bad in terms of biological sample transport. So they can be construed as being good, it can be construed as being bad because you can't necessarily ship out samples outside of India, which is a perfectly fine thing because it enables companies like us to be able to do that. So I think one is that a lot of times these policies become blanket policies which can be changed and changed in the sense that you'd be able to make it specifically if you're trying to solve a large big grand challenge. That is the one thing. The second area is that when you are in an area which requires a lot of research and innovation, you're also constantly interfacing with academia. And the challenges then become that if you're looking at saying if you want to work with the best academic universities, there should be incentives on both sides. And I think in this morning, I think the minister, he pointed out that he's freeing up some of the universities and I think that's a great thing for innovation to happen. But otherwise, I think currently there are the way a lot of the structures have been done in terms of public partnerships, public policy, whatever the public private partnerships are very skewed. And they're skewed to a point where nobody will be able to benefit out of it, neither the public nor the private. So I think those kinds of things need to be sorted out. And then you look at something like what we are trying to do, which is saying can we generate data for a billion? Like you have other cards for a billion people. Can you also have genomic data for a billion people? In order to get to that, I think there needs to be a thought process in terms of saying, do you want to go to preventive? Do you want to think about creating something like that? And can it be an effort that can be done by multiple levels? And I think that would require a lot of policy thinking in terms of saying, how does this benefit the country overall, right? And I think those are the some of the thought processes that I have other ideas as well. I'm glad you raised that issue because I think that's the kind of role Carnegie wants to play to see these disruptive industries and see the kind of policy framework which we can help contribute towards to do that, just so that the audience gets the flavor of what you mean by, as per your company, like your DNA patri or your genome patri, can you just share a bit of light as to what that really does to people that they can predict how their future is going to be from a health point of view? So what you're doing is you take a little swab sample or blood sample and essentially anything that has DNA in your body. And we are getting the entire, we analyze that DNA. And once you get analyzed the DNA, we are, we can tell based on an average population whether you are at a risk for a particular condition or not, but we don't leave it at that. We then say, how do you then combine this with something like your family history or lifestyle and everything else to be able to say what is it that we can recommend that you do? In most cases, I think 80% of the problems whether it when it looks, when you look at cardiovascular and other problems can be solved by simple interventional methods. And I think the first thing is to be able to know yourself. So at this point, I think we are doing it as, as an, you know, where we sell direct to consumer or also through our channel partners like hospitals and other companies. But if this can be made something that is a necessary requirement, if there is a way of being able to say, is this the base level data that we need for the country? I think, you know, it changes a lot of things because many countries are thinking about on those lines. So it's a more preventive way of looking at healthcare and health lifestyle. Radhika, you're in a space where traditional laws and policies have been like supportive of the Dukanwala or the trader, Dukanwala being the shopkeeper. You're trying to talk about creating data set for them. It might be completely different language when you talk to them about it saying, I need your digital data points. But what kind of transformation do you think you're able to drive which can overcome the kind of policy challenges that we're talking about? So honestly, you know, I think we're at a very, very base level and Anki pointed that out, right? Lot of the regulations just don't even exist. And some of them that are coming into play are sadly more of a hindrance than support. And this is on a day-to-day business. So there are two sets of regulations that have happened very recently. One is actually the startup environment. How do you start an enterprise in India and more in terms of, you know, how do you do a tech startup? I do think the government has made a lot of progress there. But then when you come down to look at e-commerce specifically or industry specifically, there are hurdles, taxation, no clarity there, new taxation that comes up that is irrelevant, doesn't make any sense. We look at India as a single country. The states look at it as different regions. That's a hurdle for us when we ship products out from one to another. The other thing is that there is a new regulation that came out very recently. The DIPP came out with the marketplace definitions. And good for us, we are very excited about it. But having said that, do we really want the government to tell us that this is how you run your business? You know, you have so many marketing dollars, and this is where you need to spend it and this is where you don't spend it. Pricing cannot be controlled by the government. So there are some places where there is obviously a very, very, how to put it, very obvious pushback that needs to be given to the government. The right regulations have to be made for the progress of the government, of the entire industry. There have been a lot of conversation around the valuation of the entire consumer internet space over the last six odd months. I just say what Mark Twain said. You know, the reports of my debts are greatly, greatly exaggerated. The fact is that 1.3 billion population, about 900 million of them actually have a phone. 300 million have a smartphone. Enable us, enable us to help empower them. Enable us to help engage them. And there is a lot of policy work that can be done around that. Of course, you know, broadband penetration, mobile penetration, all of that, those are basics. But beyond that enabling commerce and some of the regulations, just as an example, some of the shipment regulations that we have with the India Post were built in 1908. And there have been no changes ever since. There is, they just assume that e-commerce doesn't exist. So there is definitely changes that need to be made. Having said that, I do feel that the government continues to move in the right direction. We continue to get the right feelers from the government. There is constant engagement. There was a start-up day for heaven's sake. In India that's never, ever happened, ever. There was a start-up day where Prime Minister Modi was there. And amazing, right? That the kind of energy that you saw in the entire event, the kind of policies that came out were great for the entire industry. So movement in the right direction, but a long way to go. A long way to go. And that's where the kind of policy vacuums that you are talking about, we would like to identify at Karnagindi and take ahead. And Aki, the fact of the matter is, in backdrop of the theme of today, India as a leading power, the opportunity lies here. You're looking at a billion population. You're looking at the purchasing power. We have come a long way. And if you read Ashley's paper, which was released yesterday and we presented it to the Prime Minister, if we have a solution oriented approach, things do move forward. So in your perspective, which are those positives that you can see on the horizon, which will kind of enhance the entrepreneurial efforts that people are doing? Your Facebook initiative of trying to connect rural entrepreneurs has seen a lot of traction as well. So there is a lot of hope, which is coming around as well. I think the connectivity side of things has definitely unleashed a lot of ideas. And I think this is the beauty of the internet because the organizing logic of the internet in itself helps in bringing smart people together who can then get together and hack a lot of this new age companies which you are seeing coming together. So that ecosystem certainly exists. What is happening is that in itself is a promise. I think there is a recognition of that energy and also the youth demographics and also the intellectual capability of our people over here which has led to the celebration of the startup through the startup day. There is this venue. There is a convening forum now for people to get together in order to have a dialogue because given the traditional way policymaking is done in India, it's very difficult for the startup community to have either convening power or negotiating power with policy makers and with regulators to make sure that there is minimum government and maximum governance that they stay out of the way. So I think those ecosystems are getting formed which is the net positive. And I think what the government has done in terms of embracing that notion, embracing that constancy and making sure that they are creating these spaces for that kind of dialogue to happen is a good start. But I think the challenge starts where beyond the dialogue, things need to move into operationalization and startups want to see progress because all startups have what we call a move fast culture, right? Like you just have a move fast culture. Nobody does annual planning. Everybody is doing onto weekly planning and long term is a month planning, right? Like that's the agility and the energy of that space. And there is a disconnect there in terms of what startups or the innovation ecosystem expects in terms of speed and what we get in terms of the regulatory system which is why I'll keep on coming back to the question of capacity. There is of course a change in the political will and the operating culture but that needs to get translated deeper into the famous bureaucratic processes which we've grappled with for a very long time which you're aware of. And I think from that perspective it is useful to think of what are the kind of those modeling exercises which Carnegie potentially can lead, drive or co-guide or partner with various agencies of the government to make sure that the innovation ecosystem is understood in its fuller way because these are not companies who will have like a banking institution like a bench of in-house councils who will go and either litigate or sit and work with regulators. You have people who are innovators who are bringing products and business models to market and I think you need that environment. Also one more thing I think which we need to embrace culturally as a country is to overcome the fear of failure. I think it's very, we do it to our children, right? Like I have, my son is going to write his class 12 exams this year, next year. So, and I kind of see that in the school system and everything else. I think the fear of failure is just like so enormous. We sort of ingrain that in our children from a very young age. When you transfer that to an entrepreneurial culture it just like is antagonistic to what sits with an entrepreneurial culture because you have to have no fear of failure in that environment. So we need to incentivize that and that comes with a lot of things and of course there's a cultural component to this but also I think we need better bankruptcy laws like if some company goes bust, it goes bust, right? So we need to have those kind of enabling environment both in terms of cultural side but also in terms of creating the right policy environment to facilitate that. I think we did hear that in the Founders Committee breakfast meeting in the morning where Jayant Senha outlined the kind of redefinition of Indian capitalism. That's what he talked about. Whether it's the cleanup of the stressed assets of the banks, unleashing education and research and academia, trying to redo some of the laws but one thing which I wanted to get a quick perspective from each one of you and then I'll kind of take a few questions before we wrap up the discussion. Sometimes the deli factor skews our view and one of the feedback I've heard from a lot of people who are well-wishers or they call themselves well-wishers is the DFD, distance from deli factor is going to be very critical, if not physically at least in thinking, to ensure that you are able to see and hear what's happening across the country. And I think all three of you are in some ways leading that, seeing that you're based out of Bangalore, you're based out of NCR but you have to deal with merchants all over the country and Akhi, you're from a social media platform looking at everywhere else. Anu, beyond deli, what is the pace of change that we are seeing at the state level, at the district level, people are lapping up digital innovations. We are looking at mobile internet banking. The prime minister told us yesterday to focus on JAM, that the Janadhar and the Adhar and the mobile governance piece. Sometimes we feel that in deli that recognition is like, oh my God, nothing is happening but maybe things are happening on the ground. Certainly, so I think I'm from Hyderabad and I think the interesting thing was that ours, Hyderabad is now, there is Telangana and there is Andhra Pradesh and both of them want to say they are both now start-up states. So they've actually created some very amazing, both of them are doing some amazing things, both the Telangana government as well as the Andhra Pradesh government. And I think I've been very pleasantly surprised because I like the way they've been sort of thinking about certain problems. Now whether it is a problem of saying one statement which doesn't concern anything with what we do but I remember our minister of IT saying that we want to ensure that there are safe roads for anybody at any time where you go. Now this might sound like a very simple statement to make but it means that when you make a statement like this you have to put in a lot of infrastructure and a lot of things, policies to actually make that happen. I think similarly, I think if you start looking at problems that you want to solve and what you want to achieve at the end state, the policies should flow from there rather than saying, can I create X policy or can I make a incremental change to the policy that was already there? Instead if we say that this is the, we are in state zero, we want to get to state seven and what is the state seven? Can we come up with the quicker way of getting to state seven? Can we leapfrog some of these few things that have happened in other countries for instance? I think then we are doing a good job of policy and I think that is one of the things I'm seeing in both the states where both Chandrababu Naidu as well as Mr. K.C.R. Both of them are thinking differently and I think it's a good thing when you have states that are start-ups and they have leadership that can start thinking on those terms. That would mean that we have to redraw the Indian map, which is likely difficult for them. No, no, no, I'm not talking, we are already, I think this is a new government also, right? I mean, even at the center level, there's a new government. So there is a possibility of being able to say, can we rethink a lot of things that have happened? Plus they don't have the baggage or the legacy of the past, so they are thinking afresh. In terms of consumer power, just from your understanding, sometimes it may be difficult to convince an urban folk to say, okay, what the DNFR 3 is going to do, but sometimes the people on the ground, slightly who we feel are not connected, are actually much more connected and much more empowered in their thinking. What are you reading of that? I agree, I mean, I think, Sivanna, our first interaction was mainly with the urban elite, educated people, but as we started seeing that, when we were spreading the words more in local languages and more in other areas, we started seeing that they actually care more, because in the end, I think, when you think about it, healthcare actually bankrupts a lot of, when you start having a problem in your family, it affects more of the lower and middle class families, right? And I think, therefore, if there's a way to be able to say, can we change this whole paradigm and say that consumer class actually understands the benefit of it. So I think if you talk to any healthcare entrepreneur, they will tell you that the middle class and actually care more about health and education than the other ones that we... So-called privileged ones. Right, Radhika, your whole business model is powered by the mass market, which is the kind of population which buys. What have been your learnings and how different is the setting when we just move away from Delhi a bit and gone to the States? So I'm an eternal optimist and that's pretty much what we end up seeing as well. I'll talk about a few stakeholders over here, right? One is the grassroot level, the mass consumer, the mass Indian mass market that we talk about. And I'll also talk about India's perception from, because we also start up and we are raising money at times and we talk to a lot of the PE funds and a lot of foreign investors who are institutional investors who are looking to invest in India. So I'll give you a perspective from both these stakeholders. From the consumer angle of it, I think the policies that have been rolled out and at least the hope of policies that will be rolled out is being seen in pretty much every aspect of life, whether that's the rollout of UPI, United Payment Interface in banking, whether that is in education, whether that is in finance, whether that is in governance, Aadhar card, and pretty much in every aspect of it, you see visible progress that has been made. We talked about connectivity. Till about 18 months ago, I would say 5% of our consumers used to be women because women in tier two, tier three, which is where we are more popular, just don't have access to internet. They would have to rely on a male member of the family to actually take you either to a cyber cafe or use an office computer when they come in to actually make a purchase. That number has gone up to 25% because the mobile phone is a personal device that they can actually use to make a transaction. Now, having said that, yes, we have issues. I'm sitting here in Delhi and 3G doesn't work at times and Mr. Mittal is saying, but sorry, that's a problem. But things are changing on a daily basis and we see a change in both the consumers and the merchants. The past system that I talked about earlier is not a machine. It is on your phone and it is not possible for merchants to be able to use that unless connectivity is good. So things are changing, merchants are using it. They are digitizing their inventory. They're digitizing their catalog and you see a very significant change happening in tier two and tier three, which is powered by internet, which is providing access to information, which is the biggest change that has happened. Access to information is not just within the metros, within tier one right now, it's creating a level-paying fee and I think that is the most important part. Now, the second set of stakeholders, 7.7% growth rate and Mr. Mittal did a great job of telling us what the growth rates were for the other countries. 1.3 billion consumers, hopefully at some point or the other, we will cross some of the hurdles that Anki talked about and they will be connected. 900 million phone users, 300 to 400 million depending on what report you believe, smart phone users who are connected on the internet, 50 million people who are buying on the internet. Of course, it's a huge, huge, huge opportunity. There is money that's ready to come into India and be invested in India and the policies of the government, whether that is Mr. Modi going out and talking about what he's doing, whether in agriculture, whether it is the fact that instead of seven kilometers of road that were being built about a couple of years ago a day, now there are 30 kilometers of road, whether that's infrastructure, whether that's education, the changes are visible and I think the investors are seeing that too. So both an external perception of India has improved very significantly and internally you do see the changes happening on the grassroot level regardless of what you hear in Delhi. Distance from Delhi factor, so you have just reassured that, Aki, Radhika touched upon an interesting fact, which is the diversity of internet usage and I think Ashley and Bill both were very supportive when I tried to structure this panel of all women. Facebook is doing its bit to kind of connect Google women who are entrepreneurs, even a small flower garland maker or people like that and you're kind of giving a voice to the business. How innovative will the digital platform be to drive diversity in the country? I think it's an incredibly powerful tool but to come back to the Delhi factor, Delhi is no different from any other capital city of the world. I mean, the Delhi bubble is comparable to the Washington bubble, don't single out Delhi, it's the same thing. You just have to see it, deal with it, disregard it and go on. I hope you know Washington is my headquarters. So, but to come back to the point that you raised, I think it is a tremendously empowering tool, the limitation which she talked about. This is a traditional fight which women in this country have had, which is access to resources. Don't forget that we had succession laws in terms of rights to property to your own family, legislated much later. So, I think it's been a constant struggle in terms of access to resources and we have to see it in that type of social context as well. But what is heartening to see is that this is on a approach swing on a growth trajectory. And I think the personal mobile device has been a very big tool in terms of making sure that you are putting decision-making rights and decision-making in the hands of women. And I think the internet in that sphere plays a very important role. In terms of how it unleashes economic opportunity, I'll just give you an example. There's this amazing woman called Kalpana Rajesh. She was working for a BPO center in Hyderabad and started a family. And after maternity leave, she obviously, I mean women have to deal with this in terms of balancing home and work life. She decided not to come back to her regular employment and instead started this enterprise which was about making bridal accessories with her mom and her domestic help. It was just a 3% shop. And then she created a Facebook page. Today she employs more than 200 women. She has a call center in Mumbai from where she takes orders and does order for women. There are different kind of production sites which she has in different parts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. She's catering to the entire Telugu diaspora externally as well and has a very profitable business. So I think what just happened is that marketing costs have got totally disintermediated. It has become such an important factor of production. Social media platforms and internet have become such important factors of production. It has given women the independence to structure their own social and economic identities and become very important parts of economic organization in our country. So this is only a net positive thing. On that note, I'll just take a couple of questions before we wrap up the first session and then one of the... Yes, sir, right at the front. Can we just get those mics right in the front here? This gentleman here. My request would be, sir, to keep the questions short and if you can target it to the person who you want them to answer. So please go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Calcutta, you're right. My name is Jan Malik. I am heading to think tanks. One in Calcutta. There is to do with commerce, Asian commerce and one out here, control on foundation. Very impressed with all the three ladies and all that you have to say. I got a question and a comment. The question is based on what Anu and Radhika said. How about the structures are skewed in India? There was one comment made a second by Radhika. That was about the shipment regulation is 1908. Pre-dates Carnegie by two years. Now, today's paper is carrying the news of there are five Cs which are holding up India, CBC, CBI, CIC, CAG and court. Now, obviously there is something that must be worrying you. We have said it in so many words. Can you comment as to what is that government should do or should these structures change themselves dramatically? Because if you relate to IT, for a long time government did not know what was happening. So there was a great progress. Then the greed came in and the government came in. I mean which one came first you can decide. But and the trouble came. And all these restrictions came because they wanted control and what happened. So one is comment on that. Second is Radhika's very impressed about this negotiating power. And that is a suggestion for Carnegie. We have three tanks, the think tanks, governmental think tanks you might say. I happened to be the governing body of one IDSA. Now, CPR had come out with something wonderful, Center for Policy Research. They created a center which is now moved separately, which invited the parliamentarians. You know about that. Now unless Carnegie does something, then that negotiating power will not be with all the three wonderful ladies and all the other people who are wanting to flourish in a system where rules are old. Thank you. So I think I had written in detail about a lot of the challenges that are there in the article that I wrote for the Hindu business line. It was called the culture pitted against entrepreneurship. But essentially I think there were three main issues. One was that I think if you look at every all of it, it was a lack of trust. And the lack of trust came from multiple different sources of where they came from. But I would say that the first simplest thing would be to be able to have a very clear understanding of what are the actual touch points for each of these departments that are playing a role in any startups life. And I think that's the hardest, especially when you are doing an innovative product. Because you are not classified, then the classification itself becomes a challenge. Because each of the products have a classification code. And then you are bucketed in that space and therefore you follow a lot of these things. Now there are multiple departments and multiple times each of them don't know each other's where one comes and where the next one comes. So I think there is a challenge of simplification of creating workflows and creating simplifications for a startup point of view. Because as a startup, I'm not really, I don't have 20 people who are assisting me on every such documentation field. The second, I guess the second challenge also has been about saying, if we had to also change the way a lot of these things can happen in terms of the power of who has access to being able to change what you are doing, I think currently that is at levels that anyone can stop what you're doing. And I think there is a challenge because for entrepreneurs, one is the access to capital, which I think there has been a lot of changes over the last few months. In terms of loans and borrowings and various other things. The second is on being able to say, can I actually get, can I, can someone in some tax department suddenly come and stop me from doing business without prior notice? The third is getting love letters from various departments that you don't know why they came. So I think for a startup it becomes very hard to be able to deal with all these different things because you're a very small company, right? Most of the times a startup has five people, 10 people. We are 35 people right now, after two and a half years. So I'm saying it would be very helpful if things could be simplified a lot because in the end, I think we are all trying to solve a big problem for India, right? Or doing something where you're not just doing a startup because you are going to make money, but you're doing it because you're solving a problem that is probably not yet seen by the regulatory agencies. So I think that is the challenge that you're facing that if you're looking at something that's forward, you can't be using the same lens to be able to solve those regulatory challenges. At the same time, I think given that I'm in the health space, there is a need for regulation, right? There is a need for regulation because you can't have human life not regulated. But I think the question is who does that? You know, who creates those regulatory, you know, who creates those regulatory challenges? I think that is where the problem lies because the regulatory bodies are always going to be behind in terms of where the rest of the innovation is. So I think if you could get people who are doing that to be helping and creating those frameworks, it becomes far easier, I think. I think that's where Carnegie will play a role. Radhika, you are coming before I finish. Just to add to an Anu's phrase, pretty much all of it very beautifully. I think I come from the other end of the spectrum, right? Trying to do something innovative that's never been done before. We are trying to disrupt an industry that's already powerful in India. So the regulations, again, that come in and guide us or they're supposed to be guidelines for us are most restrictive in nature because they're made for a different industry altogether. Retail, traditional offline retail is retail, yes. E-commerce is retail, yes. But should we be guided by the same regulation? Should we be guided by the same policies? Not at all. Because we are trying to solve different problems. We are trying to empower a different set of people all together. So I do think most of the problems that Anu pointed out are very, very true. For us, more than that, we actually come down and on a day-to-day basis, what we see is infrastructure issues, whether that is technology infrastructure, whether that's connectivity infrastructure or whether that's actual infrastructure of getting products out to tier three and rural India. And I think policies around that will always be very, very helpful. And your point about what Carnegie should be doing, engaging with elected representatives is well-taken and we are going to be doing that as well. We had one, yes, sir. Raja, you had a question, Raja? Raja, you said something? No, that's it. No, the gentleman at the back, yeah. Can you please stand so that they can identify where you are, yeah. Namaskar from Kolkata. I'm Gyanesh Chaudhary from Vikram Solar. I had a question for Ms. Das. Some very good insights into all the stuff that you all are doing. I'm a bit conflicted with your take on digital connectivity. Whereas India has one kilometer of roads per thousand people, US is at 25, France is at 17 or 15 or something. My question is, are we talking about first world problems in a developing country, whereas when we talk about solar, we talk about how 25 to 30% of India doesn't even have basic healthcare, basic amenities, power, kerosene lamps and things like that. Are we talking about two different worlds sitting here and how can you justify this? I get your point. It's connectivity relevant, but I think it is, but I'll let Raki take it. I think this is a point, like overvalorization of connectivity is their point, right? This is something which I hear all the time. Connectivity will not work if you don't have 100% power connectivity, right? Because phones also need power to charge. I think these are not substitutable goals or priorities, but the acceleration of progress that you will get through digital connectivity is well established. There's enormous research and data to prove that. And it's not an either or situation. I think a country of this size, when you're talking of scale, you just have to have digital connectivity in order to bring the efficiencies, which is the hallmark of any modern society if you have to make your production, your producers more effective. It just has to be there. The challenge in India, unlike the United States, is that we have only one form of connectivity which operates at scale, which is mobile connectivity. And which also, again, largely is 2G, which is a very legacy technology. Unlike the United States, India does not have pervasive fixed line connectivity. It does not have cable connectivity. So we are over-reliant as a country on mobile internet and mobile wireless technology. And that too, we have something which is fairly old, which, I mean, it's a 30 year old technology. And because of a variety of reasons which people in this room know, that acceleration has not happened. So therefore, this is, and there's all these things like what is urgent and what is important. This is both urgent and important. And I will use every opportunity to make that point. All right, we'll take one more question before we wrap up for a quick tea coffee and to the next session. Yes, sir. Please go ahead. Can you just get a mic across to him, please, Abbas? Sure, in Kumar, I'm a former Indian ambassador. I'm also founding president of Indo-American Defense Association. Quite a few things which I heard here, I have heard long time back. In Chicago, I used to hear Reza Gupta, Professor Deepak Jain, Prabhupada Balachand talking about government has no business doing business. From Rajan U2 Chicago, you also take more government delays. Now, certainly we have come a long way when we have one billion cell phone for 1.3 billion people. I remember when I took Mr. Pramod Mahajan to Motorola, Ellusen Tech Log, they were still talking about whether we should really have cell phones or not. But when Prime Minister launched this startup and began working, he was promoting all credences in one single day. Is it still in the realm of possibility or is it happening? The second point, one of the panelists talked about failure of, I mean, fear of failure. Now, in US 2008 when finance fell down and many of giant banks were failing, the US government pumped in billions of dollars to save them. In India, we all know, Air India has been failing for decades. Government pumps in money. So when the startup companies fail, shouldn't there be some government fund or some kind of mechanism to support them, not for eternity, at least for first two, three failures so they can come up again and make money? Thank you. I think Akim made that point. Radhika and Anu have a pic about it, Radhika. So quickly on that and kind of referring back to the start of India initiative again, this is the first time the government actually announced the ease of shutting down a business, shutting down a business in itself in India was a nightmare, right? You know, declaring bankruptcy, saying that, hey, I'm not gonna run this business anymore. For a lot of you who are policy makers, you probably realize that that was a nightmare in itself and this is coming from somebody who has a failed startup before this one. And that is a step in the right direction that it is going to become easier. Should the government step in with funds to support failing startups? I'm not a big fan of that. I think the government should definitely have incubators. We were talking about that earlier to support startups that are just coming up and that have the potential that are solving real problems in India. For startups that are, and the whole startup mentality, agility that Anki talked about, you know, it is try fast and fail fast. And once you've failed, have the ability for them to move on to the next new thing, which is what the government has actually done right now. What we don't have in action and is that if a startup is successful, is it easy for it to move to the next level? That policy is not in action right now and that's something that maybe the government should be looking at. I don't know. Yeah, so I would think that, you know, I don't know if the government should fund failing startups, but it would be nice if let's say a big corporate could adopt these startups. I mean, in the sense that, you know, there is something, if there is something of value. So one is that, you know, if it is of no value, shut it down. And the bankruptcy laws should be such that it's easy to do that without affecting the entrepreneurs, personal ego and all because a lot of times you start up, you are signing a lot of personal guarantees, you are signing a lot of things, you're signing your life essentially. And I think that should stop. But the second thing is, you know, whether if there's an idea which has some real value, you know, the big corporate should say, you know, I'm going to support this, you know, and it's a great opportunity for India to be able to take those ideas and say, can we get to the next level? I wouldn't personally recommend the government to fund that. Okay, obviously, government intervention from a subsidy point of view, startups is the last thing that they need. They rather need startup funds, but let me try and wrap up and as I do that quick 10 seconds comment each, we're glad that Carnegie India could host you all. Aki, first from you, where do you see think tanks and companies such as yours working together in India? I think what is very important is to sort of collaborate together to start shaping public opinion because there are legacy systems which have to be changed when you try and create this ecosystem. And I think we have the ability today through the spread of technology. After all, don't forget in 2014, the internet and social media platforms played a big role in the election of this government. Two 27 million interactions on Prime Minister Modi in 2014. Don't be surprised by the mandate he got, right? So I think there is a certain organizing logic which politicians use much better than we do and industry really needs to take lessons from how politicians really use this technology and use these platforms to run campaigns. And I think if we have to push for reforms, we need to create new way of doing policy, which is what are those kind of leading ideas which you start building salience on in terms of shaping public opinion and then basically exerting the influencing power of that in terms of policymakers and regulators to embrace that. Right, thank you Aki, Radhika, very quickly. My two cents on this is that for a lot of startups, for a lot of the new age industries per se, there is no experience of policy, right? There is no experience of policymaking, there is no experience of lobbying. We don't know how it works. We know what we need, but we don't know who to talk to at all. And there are hundreds and millions of us out there. And I think for an organization like Carnegie, the scale that you're coming in at and shaping public policy, as Anki put it, but unlike for Facebook, for the millions of startups that are happening out there. And regardless of the industry, whether that's a technology startup or something that is in the more traditional space, being their voice, being the voice of the young entrepreneur in India, because believe me, India is the country of entrepreneurs and you're gonna see more and more of that as we go forward, that will be a greater. Fantastic, Anu? So I think given that we are in a future-looking space, I think there is, what would be helpful will be to be able to say, not just standardize it based on efforts in other countries, but to be able to see beyond that. I think if there is a way of being able to say is if we can think about policies that will allow us to go over these few things that other countries have done by looking at policies across the globe, that helps, I think, in areas of research and innovation. Fantastic, on that note, I would like to thank you all just by adding a couple of points. We take your suggestion very seriously. Carnegie India does plan to do that, engage with parliamentarians, but more importantly, under Bill's leadership, we are looking at this entire effort to ensure that disruptive, futuristic technologies that are coming in, innovation that are coming into the country are going to help contribute towards the transformation process that we've been talking about. And one thing which you said kind of now stuck in my head, which we will continue to pursue, is that startups are the general, yes, of course, money making is important, but by doing this innovative disruption, you're also solving India's problems. Specific to India, which needs India-focused solutions. And I think we will, as much as we can, work with all of you, collaborate with all of you, to try and see how those innovative solutions lead to a greater Indian development model. Thank you so much. Please give them a round of applause. The three ladies, Apigarh, Radhika Agarwal, and Anu Aachana. On that note, we'll take a five minute key break. The tea is tea and coffee at the back of the room. And I will be calling on my next panel, Raja Mohan, Dimitri Trenen, and Zohan Ronsey on to the stage. Raja, please. Please don't leave the room. So just take your tea and coffee and come back so that we can start the next session on time in about five to seven minutes.