JOIN USParliamentary Committee for External Affairs Chairman Shashi Tharoor said Indians with skills should adopt innovations to brighten the path towards economy.
Delivering the keynote address at Grand Finale Teenovators 2016, a national innovation challenge for young minds, organised by INK and Manipal University here, Tharoor said the growing faith in the innovation potentials in India to solve the problems is no real surprise.
“India has been increasingly becoming an entrepreneurship-driven economy that looks towards innovation as a path towards future. India is the first country in the world which successfully launched the spacecraft into the orbit of Mars in the very first attempt at a much cheaper cost ($74 million),” he added.
On Indian economy
Maintaining that Indians have proved themselves in a number of ways, he said all these developments would change the Indian economic scenario by 2020.
In the post liberalisation period from 1990, India has transformed itself drastically. In 2015, IMF had predicted that Indian economy will be the fastest growing economy by 2020. Unfortunately, the country has lost the rank with demonetisation, he remarked.
Tharoor said India is the youngest major economy. China, Japan and Korea have been facing severe demographic squeeze as these countries have been rapidly ageing. By 2020, the average Indian age would be 29, while the average age in America, it would be 40, and 47 in Japan. A huge chunk of Indian population is below 25 years (50.1%), while there is 65% of Indian population below 35 years of age. There are 116 million Indians on the work force of 20 to 24 years, while that of China is 94 million. Accordingly, there would be 32% increase in the Indian work force by 2020 and there would be 5% decline in China, he said.
He cautioned that demographic dividend would turn out to be a demographic disaster, if the country continues to produce uneducated and unemployed workforce.
Warning
The former Union minister warned that the youths with no jobs are responsible for untoward incidents in 165 districts in the country.
“We have failed to equip them with the tools and train them in education to be part of society and define the future. We need to have more world-class innovations coming out from Indian minds. New generations should work for the underprivileged and it is important to innovate for India,” he said.
He called upon the students to never give up.
“Politics is not for honesty. Politics was harsh to me. But politics is still a genuine way to make difference for the country’s future and do it for the cause of one’s belief,” he concluded.