WEF: India needs to focus on innovation, infrastructure & inclusive growth, says Telangana's IT Minister

The 50th edition of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is underway in the Swiss mountain town of Davos. This global epicentre of power brings together political and business leaders to discuss global opportunities and challenges. Some of the leaders like KT Rama Rao, IT Minister of Telangana and Guruprasad Mohapatra, DPIIT Secretary shared their views with CNBC-TV18. According to Rama Rao, India is one of the most compelling business stories, the world has come to start believing in and the world has come to start looking at it in the right light. “There are few factors that worked well for us –one, this whole engine room population, which is about 40 percent of the youth between the ages 20 and 40 is a huge advantage, which no other country at this point of time possibly can talk about. Two, the way innovation as an ecosystem is emerging in India is also extremely promising. We have had some billion unicorns come up, even in the most unlikeliest of the locations. India has a huge advantage, which both the government in Delhi and our government in Telangana are going to leverage,” said Rama Rao. Rama Rao further said, there are three things that work from a state perspective – while the larger policy decisions are made in Delhi, the action is in states. “The three things Telangana is focusing on are ease of doing business, the cost of doing business has to be lower, and the quality of doing business has to also improve. So these three aspects need to be bundled together. By quality of business, I mean the quality of talent, the quality of human resources, the quality of infrastructure. I am a firm believer in the three ‘I’ mantra, if India wants to propel itself into greatness - innovation,   infrastructure, inclusive growth. These three ‘I’ put together is what is going to help states emerge stronger and obviously the stronger the states, stronger the nation,“ he said, adding that they have been working very closely with DPIIT and their entire team. We are thankful to them for their support but a lot more needs to be done on infrastructure space. Mohapatra said, “What we are trying in government of India is to firstly ramp up our infrastructure spending and you have heard that honourable Prime Minister’s announcement about that figure and this will obviously go to the states, because the states is where the land is and state is where the action is. Secondly, we are going to further strengthen the start-up ecosystem in the country. We will try to bring more incentives for them, we will ensure that their credit needs are satisfied in reasonably cost effective manner. We are going to give them more research and development (R&D) incentives, more tax incentives, so that startup preoccupation of Government of India as well as states is going to continue and further improve,” “As far as investment is concerned, we are going to do very strong kind of hand holding with the potential investors who come to India, not only in terms of bringing all the government of India regulatory departments at one place but also to bring states along with. We plan to give the investor all the information online so that if he wants to go to Telangana right from where he is in the world, he will come to know which site is available in Telangana, what are the downward and forward linkages available for that etc. All these things will see investor certainty,” Mohapatra said. When asked how many states were on board for this plan, Mohapatra said, “Almost all state governments have come on board and we have had several rounds of meetings and we are planning to further strengthen the investment framework that we have in terms of perfect hand-holding for the potential investors who would like to come to the country, not only Indian but also the foreign investors.”   This is a partnered post.