 So, ladies and gentlemen, now let's get the ball rolling with the opening address by Mr. Madan Bihal, Co-Founder and Managing Director of AdFactors PR. He will be speaking on the topic, Economic Revival post COVID and the role of communication in amplifying and channelizing the positive business segments. A very warm welcome to you, sir. Thank you, Khyati. Thank you, Anuragji, Navalji, the editorial team and the events team led by current Madhya for inviting me to make this opening comment. I have been watching the video of exchange for media and I think as a media house you should get the award for the most number of awards in the Indian Markham and the media space. On behalf of the PR industry, I wish to appreciate your efforts in highlighting the cause of the PR industry for your news coverage and your commentary and giving space to many leaders in the PR industry to come and voice their opinions and views. The IPRCC itself has become a very watched event along with your other initiatives like the 30 and 30, the 40 and 40, the women leaders of public relations, the top 100 list. I think they have a fair traction in the industry and thank you for all of these things. However, I want to make a point to Anuragji and to the editorial team that I still think that the level of coverage for PR given its scale and importance as Anuragji so well articulated a few minutes ago, I think is at best meager on the exchange for media platform. In terms of audience, it's a very significant community both on the comms and the agency side now and you might when in your own interests increase the coverage because I often see an important news of the PR industry hidden in the inside pages while even a small significant relatively thing in media or advertising makes it to the front page and stays there for a long time. I hope the editors look into this with the new empathy that it requires. The IPRCC 2020 is happening in February 21 few months later than it should have happened thanks to the pandemic. As we all know, the pandemic has kind of kind of appended and disrupted everyone and everything. No country, no society on the planet has been spared. This time it's a fairly democratized thing. The young and the old, the rich and the poor, the East and the West are all impacted alike. Crows of people have been infected millions or at least a couple of million have died. Many more have suffered the economic consequences of the pandemic through lost jobs and dented incomes and it's difficult for us even to comprehend the scale of this not once in a century, I think in once in a thousand years kind of an impact of an event, Black Swan event that has impacted the whole world including us. Many sectors of the economy worldwide will take a fair amount of time to recover to their full glory and operations. Humanity however in general has shown as they always as human beings always do great resilience in the Indian society in particular has demonstrated what might one it's a characteristic strength through these challenging times at all levels at individual, at business, at government, at non-government, at institutional all of them have stood their ground quite well through this pandemic. One might attribute this to the strength of our culture, our character, our deep philosophical roots in dealing with everything both good and bad and that's how we manage such pain and traumas a little better than maybe the rest of the world. The pandemic is nowhere close to eradication, there is still a level of fear and anxiety all over and life is limpid back to some order, vaccination is in progress but we are some distance away from normalcy. However there are unmistakable signs as we all know of economic revival. Stock market indices are one indicator because they kind of predict the future. Nifty is as you all know about 100% more than 100% higher than the March lows actually about 120%. It's 20% higher than the pre-COVID high. eBay bills as people in business and industry would know are at the pre-COVID levels they represent the movement of goods in the economy across the country. Electricity demand in January 2021 was at an all-time high. The housing economy is limping back copper as it is fondly called Dr. Copper because it's a great indicator of economic activity. Copper prices are at an all-time high. I can share many more points or proof points of economic revival. GST collections for example in January at 120 lakh crores were at an all-time high. The purchase managers index at 58.9 in October 2020 was the highest since 2008. Rural markets were exceptionally strong. Demand for tractors as reported by for example Mahindra and Mahindra and even Scots I think were 50% higher in January on a year-on-year basis and I think all these are great proof points of economic revival which working from home we may not have experienced as well. The economic survey presented recently forecast GDP growth of, real GDP growth of 11% after a fall of 7.7% in FY21. So the number 11% is for FY 2022. Now while all this revival is happening there is even more good news and that's the strong tailwinds for economic growth. We have seen for the first time a budget in many years that has not been criticized by anybody or maybe I haven't heard anything. It was appreciated by the small and the big alike, the individual and the government and the large industry alike and the financial sector alike. People called it a pro-growth budget. The massive public spending envisaged in infrastructure, the multiple governmental initiatives across capacity building in many areas and sectors I think will go a large way, long way in boosting the survival. Consider the surge in foreign direct investment. I think our reserves are now approaching nearly 600 billion dollars. It's an all-time high investment. I would imagine the events in the geopolitics with the state of investments coming or likely to come in manufacturing. Driven by the attractiveness of this country as a stable and the predictable socio-cultural political system, I think will go a long way in seeing that this economic growth is provided or revival is provided for the tailwind for a long, long time to come. But would I miss out if I didn't mention another unique thing that's happened and that's a tsunami of techno-entrepreneurship. We are so expected to have 100 unicorns, some 60,000 to 70,000 startups. So I would say the best is not yet to come, but the best is about to come. It's imminent and as a society will be prepared for things to come. But is there a dark lining to a silver cloud yet that's not gone away? Maybe, yes. Even as the economic revival is happening and is strong, a certain level of uncertainty and anxiety persists as we experience it in our day to day lives. We will all have to navigate this to come clear of the pandemic and together as businesses, as people, as individuals, as societies, as NGOs, as our institutions will all have to come together to come clear of this pandemic as a national society. Many of us are justifiably uncertain about freely venturing out. I started going out a little bit personally, but one is still always a little cautious and be careful. Some are even circumspect about the vaccines. Will the vaccine work? Will it not work on me? Will it have side effects? Which is a better one? Is Bharat better or Sriram better or this better or that better? There are uncertainties we have. When will it be available? We don't know. When will everyone in India get this? We have some assessment, but all the answers are not there. Take an industry like PR or for that matter services in general, many of our young people have gone back to their hometowns, to their families. Families are worried about sending their kids back to work in other cities when they are alone to work. Consumers are uncertain about venturing out to the malls, to the shops, to the theaters, to the restaurants in public spaces in general or even using mass transportation, which in a city like Bombay might be a crucial bridge to getting back to work from offices or work from factories in the real sense. Many businesses too are uncertain about resuming work as we knew work earlier with the work from office. It's particularly true for professional services or I would say services at large and why that is important because services is the largest segment of our economy at about 55-56% of the entire economy of India is services. You know manufacturing has gone down and agriculture with all the Hullagulla about agriculture and farmers, it accounts for only 18% of the Indian economy. Take numbers are much larger and we have to respect that. Take our own situation as a firm, we are not entirely sure about the right model. Today's in a week, three days in a week, should help the people go back, one quarter of the people go back, leaders go back, the younger goal, we don't know and we're all trying to come to terms with this, how, when, why and many of these seemingly simple, simple questions are yet complex as questions and because they involve health and life and that's why they get that extra dimension of complexity and seriousness. Now if we were to extrapolate our problems as we face as individuals and businesses to a larger society, so to say, for a larger world, we can sense the scale of the problem that we're dealing with. As businesses, we can understand what are uncertainties and challenges. We must make an effort to understand as we have been trying as to what our stakeholders are dealing with, our customers, our employees, our neighbors, our communities, our even maybe shareholders and vendors and suppliers, they're all impacted with this and therein lies I think the need and the opportunity for the communications profession to step in and take charge. As Anurag said, we've done a stellar job in these last few, in these last few months but there is a significant role to play. It is easy and it's safe to say that we have become the bridge between business and all its stakeholders, business at large and all its stakeholders. I think we played that part better, more effectively than all other sister disciplines in the Markham business or Markham space. We have helped interpret the challenges of our stakeholders to our leaders in the client organizations or in our own organizations. We have recommended not just communications but the right actions and behaviors that our organizations should do to solve the problems of our immediate stakeholders and maybe at a larger social level of society at larger, at society at large. Finally, we have created communication programs that have become the bridge between the world and it's between the business and stakeholders. So we could say the PR industry has come out with flying colors, has done a stellar job through the pandemic and whether we call it communications on the client side or the consulting on the PR side or all of it combined. I think we should feel reasonably satisfied with the way all of us have together conducted ourselves. The communication people on the client side or agency side were like the frontline workers and I would repeat what Anuradha said, use the expression frontline workers and that is a good expression of business. Counseling their organizations and effectively navigating the difficult times, advocating empathy, advocating care, advocating generosity in dealing with all the stakeholders and with everybody that the organization deals with. In my humble opinion, the recognition of the role and the importance of public relations or communications went up several notches through the turbulence of the pandemic. We emerged, I can say confidently, we emerged with a consulting profession with a seat on the decision making table and I hear many interesting and exciting stories about our own client comms heads or CCOS telling us that they now have a definite seat at the table where the bird and the table not only sits and talks to them about what the right communication strategy is ought to be. More importantly, they have become the prism through which all the decisions of the organization, policies, actions of the organization are kind of run through before they are rolled out to the larger society to just understand that they are well connected and also perhaps prism risks that might come with any wrong communications or any wrong behavior. The scale of change in that sense has been rapid and one might say the profession has taken a quantum leap on both the client side and the agency side together and I'm quite pleased with it. The economic proof of our agility, of our transformation as a profession and the continuing relevance may be stated by the fact that we were perhaps the least impacted by the pandemic compared to maybe advertising, maybe some other disciplines within the PR, within the Markov industry or marketing at large. We were always custodians of reputation. We are now in a decision making or in a decision counseling position where all decisions we are getting involved with that an organization takes. Having said this, the next few months will continue. We will have to be to continue to become the bridge between a historical time divide, between the organization and its stakeholders and that historical time divide is the world will be divided into the pre-COVID and the post-COVID wise. Our organizations will look to us for guidance, our leaders will look to us for guidance and counsel to accelerate the recovery and restore some sort of order, but a normal word like normal and order are now an oxymoronage. There's nothing going to be like a new normal. It's going to be a continuous state of flux and as communication profession, I think our role has become far more dynamic and far more changing. The post-pandemic world will be even more exciting with new challenges and demands on our capabilities. We'll have to be a continuously learning profession. World-like, calm tech like at tech or my tech is becoming common world. The role of analytics, I have been enough said about all these things. So I'm not going into the details of what really is changing. All of us are very, very well aware of, but this changing world will make a tremendous demand on our capabilities and the need to continuously evolve as a profession, as an industry to serve our organizations, whether on the client side or in the agency side, better than we have been doing all these years because there's a risk and the risk is of redundancy and extinction, survival actually. If we don't evolve at the pace, we will have to evolve with the change at the rate of the external environment, at the pace of society, at the pace of change that society is witnessing. And is it fair to say that the consumer has changed more than the business? The business has changed or maybe the government has also changed more than the business. So we have to actually keep pace with the customer, not my client, but the client of the client and then represent the opportunity and the challenges. But for those of us who do it, as individuals, as teams, or as agencies, or as client side teams, I think the rewards are significant both in terms of professional and business growth. There has never been a better time. I see rapid growth and evolution of our industry at large like never before. I'm very, very confident of that. I'm eagerly waiting to see the day when Indian PR becomes a billion-dollar industry from an estimated $200 million that it is together. And sometimes when you go out abroad, it's embarrassing to say when people ask, what's the size of the Indian PR industry? And I say, about $200 million. $200 million? Oh, that might be the size of the Edelman or the Weber-Shandu office in New York. And an entire industry is smaller than one office, perhaps, of the largest with 1.4 billion people, 1.39 billion people. I think we have to do better. And the external opportunity is not a problem. The barriers, if any, are not on the demand side. The barriers on the supply side. And we are the supply side. So we have to get better. Does the demand side have a responsibility? Yes, they also have a responsibility. And the state of evolution of a supply side is actually to a significant extent determined by the agility and the smartness of the demand side, whether they budget the resources, whether they consider the relevance. Oh, you are very important. You are very good, but I'm only going to pay you like a priest is paid in a wedding, Dakshina. So I urge the demand side, the client side, to navigate the paths within, considering the importance of public relations for their own, even internal comms budgets and the external budgets. I think we've got to do better, because only then can we address the challenges, the risks and seize the opportunities that will help through communications, our organizations become more competitive, whether we're competing for consumers or human resources or natural resources or capital or policy or whatever else. And therefore it's not a favor. For your own good, you should create the resources. And I will never tire of making this point again and again, because as an industry, we suffer from this. I'm confident that the communication industry and my fraternity, I'm very proud of this fraternity, will rise up to deliver on the challenges as well as seize the opportunities that the future has to offer and meet the expectations that our own organizations, our clients expect of us. I'm very confident that we will achieve that. The event today has a great and a very impressive lineup of outstanding leaders from the PR industry, from the cons side, the agency side, as well as many marketing folks and some CEOs as well. Their perspectives on critical subjects, which are relevant to us in the times today, will be helpful to all of us in navigating the immediate future ahead of us. I wish everyone all the best and may you have a great day ahead of learnings and experiences. All the very, very best wishes and thank you Team Exchange for Media once again for putting this wonderful event together. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Mr. Bahel. Thank you for your time and sharing your insights here with us. Thank you so much.