 The Sabit 2016 and who are you? Well, I'm Professor Abhishek Mishra. I'm Minister in the UP government. I look after the Department of Vocational Education and Skill Development. So, vocational education and skill development for India? No, for the state of UP. UP is the largest state in India in terms of population. We have about 220 to 130 million people. So, we have launched the largest skill development mission in the country in India. And thankfully, you know, only day before yesterday, we won the best mission program in the country. We're getting an award tomorrow for that. So, we've been doing some very important work on that front. So, how do you develop skills? And how do you do that in India? Do you have a strategy? Yes, the strategy is you look at the emergent industry, the verticals that are growing, the horizontals that are generating interest. Also, in terms of the new investment opportunities that are coming in, so we very closely monitor the investment that is coming in, in terms of which industry sectors, which verticals, and we try and match that, marry that with the amount of talented manpower that is available in the country. If it is not there, then we have made conscious efforts to integrate and collaborate with the very best in the world, including, you know, speaking to certain companies in Germany as well in terms of plumbing, in terms of carpentry, in terms of automobiles and so on and so forth, where we can develop, you know, their capabilities and learn from them and make sure that our industry gets the best manpower that the industry needs. So, CBT is Consumer Electronics IT, something. So, Consumer Electronics is going to be more and more manufactured in India? Yes. What we've just done is we have attracted Samsung as a very important investor in the country. We have attracted a local manufacturer of mobile phones, Lava in India, and we're trying up with lots of other automobile manufacturers which are coming to UP, and we're trying to provide, you know, skilled manpower to them. We've also said that, you know, we have ITIs, we have skilled little mission. We've said to the industry that if you would like to, a particular skill where people must be trained in a certain type of skill, a certain type of machinery, if you want to bring in your experts, we will provide your resources, effort, money, and the capital side, and you can come in, train our boys and girls, but on the condition that you also employ a certain percentage of them. Not obviously not the whole lot of them, but at least some would be given an opportunity to get employed there if you're training them yourselves. So that is something which is very high and is moving very well in the country. What's the priority for India? India wants to have more and more people in the higher, higher skilled jobs? Absolutely. You know, India is at a demographic cusp which probably comes only once in the lifetime of a nation, and we'll probably be the youngest country in another 10 years' time anywhere in the world. So that means that we could be a huge powerhouse and a working base for the entire world. That would mean that we need talented manpower, we need skilled people to carry on processes, to carry on operations, to redefine business processes, and to re-engineer them. So that we can invest on the side of innovation so that we can then develop a skill set which will then be able to provide for the world, the industry, and the human needs of the world. I saw one of the slides. Is 25% of people under 25? Yes, that's right. So all these guys and girls, they want to do stuff with IT with consumer electronics? Absolutely, because it's a very important field. Also there are lots of entrepreneurial interests, lots of innovative interests in the sector of consumer electronics and IT, because as a digital economy concept, these companies, these boys and girls could be born global. So from the very first day they start targeting at the international global market. So that's something which is very exciting, and we're very keen to provide an ecosystem to create an ecosystem that is conducive for their growth and taking their businesses global. But you need to have the whole value chain in India. Are you thinking about that? Or do you just get some of it? And the rest of it might be in China? Well, you know what? The value chains are becoming more global rather than local. So yes, what we want to develop is to develop skills and capabilities in the higher end of the value chain, where you capture maximum economic value, where you capture the maximum economic rent from value. You don't really need to do everything on your own. But what you need to know is you need to innovate on your own. You need to develop those products and then streamline the processes and the rest that can be outsourced, must be outsourced to the best person. So there's a new government since one year, right? In India, and there's a big priority with this opportunity because I think there's a lot of potential, and it's hard to know exactly how big the potential can be because consumer electronics, suddenly there's something amazing. Everybody wants to buy it. It might be invented in India. Why not? Well, we have a central government which is about a year old now, about two years closing. We have the state government for which I'm the minister. That's about four years old now. And we have been integrating our policies in line with what the government of India has done and also in terms of the local context, in terms of what Uttar Pradesh needs, the local industry that is traditional industry there. We're trying to refine it. We're trying to redefine it. We're trying to streamline their processes. We're trying to make sure that the raw materials that they get, they convert maximum value addition happens at the UP level and then they get exported not just to the country, but to the global audience. So that's what we're working on. For example, Brazil has some kind of tariffs on import and then they want to manufacture in Brazil. Does India do something like this also? Yes. So we have a very conducive taxation structure and the duty structure. So if you're manufacturing in India, if you're making in India, firstly you have a huge local audience. As I said, India's about 1.2 billion people. UP as a state is about 230 million people. So that's a huge market in and of itself. So it's a great incentive for companies to come in, integrate with the local markets and serve the customers at the local level but also develop capabilities and produce there locally which can then be exported to the global market. So we have very conducive environment there. We're working on electricity. We're working on taxation structures. We're working on duty structures. We're working on electricity provisions. We're working on land supply banks creation so that the industry has a ready-made investment opportunity available. They come in, they set up shop, they start their business and they can start flying off from there. Does it make sense to do a partnership, a collaboration with China or is it just a competitor and not a partner in that way? Well, I think, as I said earlier as well, the way the industry is evolving, the way the global economics is moving, everybody is a partner and everybody is a competitor. So there are occasions when you have to partner with somebody. It could be a country, it could be an institution, it could be a company and you could also be competing with the same company at the same time in other activity. So I think the co-optition is the model that India is working on, the Tupadishas are working with in the mind at the moment and that's where we are trying to hit a try. Because China has a huge valley chain and have a big infrastructure for manufacturing. Absolutely. So I imagine maybe it's a hard job to try to compete? Well, yes, they have built up capabilities over time which is difficult to imitate in the short term but we are not really trying to imitate that. What we are trying to say is that let's develop the core with ourselves, let's develop capabilities with ourselves, let's develop that innovation and that product there. If we need to work together with somebody be it China, be it United States, Germany or any other country their skills are there, where there's a market there where we can work together, collaborate and make a product better for the global audience, we are more than open to work on those lines. One thing that I don't know if it's true to say but maybe you have in some levels, in some segments your talents might be actually higher than in China. Yes. Let's say all the software guys are super advanced and in China they're maybe not as good. So if you can combine that maybe you get to the next level of manufacturing. You don't just copy what they're doing. You do something new. Absolutely. Copping is never a good idea for any country, any person, any corporation or any economy for that matter. I think it's best to learn the best that people have to offer and then make sure that you develop your own products, your own processes which then integrate with the global value chains, the global customer interests, the global consumer electronics, IT sector, whatever sector. And I'm not saying that there are smart men and women in every part of the world. What we need to do is to have a critical mass that gets bigger and bigger because we have a bigger population and a bigger market size to cater to. So I think that's where India is poised for great growth. There's a huge domestic demand. And if you look at around World War II and later after that, the United States benefited dramatically in terms of being able to test its innovations in the domestic market and then refine them and then take them global. That's where India stands today. So we have a huge domestic market. We have huge demand. We can experiment. We can make our processes. We can try our production processes there. Learn from that, make our mistakes, refine those products and then take them to the global audience. Do you have an economic zone like Shenzhen? Do you have something like Silicon Valley? And where does it go? Because you're from one region, right? How do people choose which region to go? And which one is the one that's going to be the Shenzhen and which one is going to be the Silicon Valley? Well, I think that comes a lot from the traditional capabilities that different regions have had. And I think in UP, we have a huge consumer electronics and IT industry. If you look at the number of people from UP, about 14% of all economic value in the IT sector is created by boys and girls who belong to UP. So that's a huge cluster that we are very, very good at. Food and agricultural processing is another industry that UP has very, very strong roots because we produce the largest vegetables. We produce maximum number of milk. So a huge agreed-in economy and a huge potential for the agro-processing industry. We could be actually the food belt for the entire country and maybe for big, huge regions of the world going ahead. So that's another capabilities that we have. We have very, very strong capabilities in manufacturing in terms of the traditional industry. So we have a very strong industry in Varanasi. We have a strong industry in Muradabad. We have a strong industry in Lucknow, in Kanpur, in Bareilly, in Saharpur. So because, you know, it was a very prosperous belt traditionally. So we had lots and lots of localized industries which are present there and we are trying to capitalize them. So definitely lots of stuff is going to happen in India and people should check it out and go and see what's happening. Absolutely. Very warm invitation through you. Thank you.