Very good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Such a privilege and a pleasure to be here this evening and to get a chance to share some thoughts and feelings with all of you.

Let me begin with the person who's chairing this session, Mahendra Dev—a renowned economist. But, for me, importantly, sharing some of our finest moments when I was Director General of the Indian Council of Social Science Research and he was Director of CESS in Hyderabad. I retain the same respect for you then as I did today. Thank you.

To the gentleman who calls himself reformist historian—reforms historian Sameer Kochhar. I admire him for many reasons. But recently, the one reason for which my admiration for him has grown is because he has resisted the measurement of Indian development by standards and criteria which are Western or European or American. He has come up with criteria which are Indian by nature. And his message to us is: why should we not judge other nations by Indian criteria?

And there is a growing feeling enunciated by many Indians today—that message which goes out to the West and says: you talk to us, we talk to you; you preach to us, we disconnect. And that really is the message that Prime Minister Modi, whom we honour today with the release of the book, sends out loud and clear across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States of America.

I'm saying this also for a reason. One of the things that I have recently championed the cause of—apart from CSR, of course—is sustainability. And why is the subject of sustainability so closely linked to Prime Minister Modi? There is a reason. Think—the first-ever presence that India ever had in the sustainability ecosystem of the world was 1972, the Stockholm Conference. One leader went from India, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. And she left an indelible mark on that conference because she linked poverty to sustainability and said the biggest polluter is poverty.

Forty-three years had to pass before India again made its presence felt in the sustainability dialogue of the planet. I fast-forward you, ladies and gentlemen, forty-three years. Prime Minister Modi becomes Prime Minister in 2014. 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change, Paris—2015—one year, just one year after the Prime Minister has taken charge, he changes the entire thought process of the world with what now stands together as the Paris Agreement. That Paris Agreement from 2015 to 2015, all of these 10 years, has ruled the conversation on sustainability. Because the one part that we cannot forget about that Paris Agreement is that we must control the rise of the planetary temperature to below 2 degrees centigrade. A thought given by whom? A Prime Minister who is the Prime Minister of a nation for just one year.

I fast-forward you again. 2021, the same Conference of Parties, the same United Nations Climate Change Conference. Not Paris now—Glasgow in the UK. And this same Prime Minister, who has now been Prime Minister for seven years, makes five promises before the planet, before the globe, before the community of nations. Everybody can't recall all five and I don't wish to recall them. We need to recall only one. And he said India will achieve its net zero target by 2070. And all of us here—every single one of us—are committed to achieving that target by that date.

So what am I trying to get across to you here? That in every real substantive dialogue anywhere in the world, India holds its head high. Why is it that through all this tariff mess that has been created by one single individual in the United States, India has stood firm? Why have we stood strong? Why have we said we will not play by your rules while the rest of the world kowtows before you? It's because we have the strength in our legs, in our hearts, in our hands to be able to stand and say: alright, if you dictate this way, we will find our own path.

Another thing that Sameer talks of—and which I strongly support and have done so for many years now—is what we call Bharatiyata. In other words, what can we provide that is unique that the West will stand back and say: that is the Bharatiya model, the Indian model, the unique model. And in 2009, when I was Secretary for Public Sector Enterprises, we created the fabric for Corporate Social Responsibility—created in India, for India, by India. A model that brought in aspects that the rest of the world had never even thought of.

Again, I can go on and on till the cows come home. Just very briefly, we took CSR from the back room to the boardroom. We got the best minds of companies to deliberate upon and set the CSR agenda for their companies. I realized what is India's strength, and it came to this—civil society organizations. The corporate world derisively called them the Chappal and Jholawalas. But they are those organizations that live and breathe in communities, that work their chappals off night and day, serve the disadvantaged, the voiceless, and those who don't find a place in the dialogue of our nation—who are not in the mainstream. We have 3.3 million of them in India. We are home to the largest number of civil society organizations on the planet. And I said in my model that whereas corporate India would provide the funds for carrying out CSR projects, the implementing agencies would be civil society organizations. See the Bharatiyata of this model.

Finally, what is CSR? Can we Indianize that too? And indeed we did. When I was writing the CSR law way back in around 2010–11, there were no SDGs—they came later. What did we have? We had the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and if you look at Schedule 7, I derived my complete inspiration from the MDGs but Indianized them completely. And Schedule 7 is an Indianization of the world thought process. It has again stood the test of time.

I will conclude with one observation which I now will take from Neelkanth. And he said rightly that Orissa as a state developed so much faster than Jharkhand. There is a reason which I feel proud of—because Mr. Ramachandran was also in this room. I served under Mr. Naveen Patnaik. I had also served under his father, Biju Patnaik. What did Naveen Patnaik do that was different? Remember, ladies and gentlemen, the bureaucracy of India was known as the steel frame, subsequently referred to derisively as the bamboo frame. But Naveen Patnaik restored the steel frame of the Odisha bureaucracy, democracy. He ran his administration through his administrators. He empowered them. He allowed them to execute the briefs that he, as a political leader, placed before his state. And it is they who drove, developed and implemented that agenda. And the result is there for everybody to see.

And so with that—Sameer, to Bharatiyata, to Indian models, to the ability for us, everyone in this room, to be proud of what we are doing. Thank you. Jai Hind.

I think I don't need this. Good evening, everybody. It's an absolute honor for me to be here. Super grateful to SKOCH Awards and super grateful to you, Mr. Kochhar, for creating such an amazing platform and for recognizing the phenomenal work that everybody here has been doing and continues to do. I think you're giving a platform for voices that are many times not heard. So, super grateful to you and very much honoured to be here amongst all of you dignitaries.

It has been an absolute joy for me to just listen in to the kind of work that all of you are driving forward towards Viksit Bharat, towards 2047. Now, if I stand here and kind of think back on why—some of the questions that came up during multiple conversations, right? And how are we all progressing towards Viksit Bharat? And how is technology playing such a huge role in that transformation?

One question that I often get in my various roles is, "Hey, Sindhu, what is the next wave?" When we talk about the $280 billion technology industry? And I think that's a question that comes up quite often. Now, if I just think about it, the answer for me has been very clear, very simple as well. Because if you ask me—and I think you heard it also from our previous speaker—today, India is on the cusp of becoming a developed nation, right? And becoming a developed nation is also on that platform of becoming a global product innovation powerhouse.

Now, for me, when we talk about being a global product innovation powerhouse, this is not just a change in terms of how we look at it as an ambition, but fundamentally, I think there's a change in the mindset of how we are approaching things. Right? And it's also a fundamental change towards how India is positioning itself on the global stage. But honestly, if you ask me, if you want to get there and if you really want to kind of position things differently, I truly believe that there are three bold shifts that need to happen.

And that bold shift has to happen from all of us—the industry, it has to happen from the academia, it has to happen from change makers, it has to happen from innovators. Because especially—you know, all heard what happened yesterday from a geopolitical challenge that we are all facing. And it's not just yesterday, right? Every single day we wake up to things that are evolving, things that are changing, which also needs us to recalibrate, reimagine. What does it mean for all of us?

Now, when I talk about bold shifts that we need to make in order to get to be that powerhouse of product innovation, I think first and foremost, if you just look at technological advancements today, I mean, we've made major progress when it comes to being the services industry of the world. There's no question about that. When you look at our IT and services industry, it has really propelled our economic growth over the last decades. That's no question about it.

But in the age of AI, where technology is changing so fast, I truly believe that we have to reimagine the services playbook in this whole era and this whole age of AI. Because like I said, IT and services industry clearly has been a bedrock. But the future of how AI is changing the game—I mean, we all know it's whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not—AI is already everywhere. We are using it almost on a daily basis. Generative AI is pretty much mainstream if you ask me. The world of agentic AI is also happening, right? I mean, we are talking about a future where agents are going to talk to each other, right? Agents are going to do a lot of the work that normally humans are going to do.

And given that this is the atmosphere in which we live, the way we think about services is also changing significantly. And so for India, this is not a disruption where we kind of fear that kind of change. But I think there's a massive opportunity for us to also lead that change. And in order to lead that change, what we also need to do is to make sure that—when we go back to our curriculums, when we go back to our academia, when we go back to how our young talent who comes out of universities are equipped—we really need to give them all those right skills: how they think in this world of AI, like how do you look at a problem, how do you look at problem solving itself? How do you look at design thinking as a construct of how you break down problems?

Because technologies will keep evolving. But how do you look at a problem? How do you design-think it? How do you make sure that you think through end-to-end systems which can scale, which can stand the test of time? This is a little bit of the thinking—the domain skills which are so much needed when we talk about solving some of the world's most critical business problems. These are some things which I truly believe need to happen: change in that core talent agenda. And for that to happen, we need a deeper collaboration between the industry; we need a deeper collaboration with the government; we also need a deeper collaboration with the corporates as well.

Now the second thing, if you may allow me: we need to move from this consumption mode to creation mode. Now what do I mean by that? Today, if I look at India, I mean, clearly we've established ourselves—there's no question. Over the last decades we've been supporting and running the world's largest businesses. We are clearly seen as that powerhouse when it comes to supporting the world's back office. But however, if we want to build that brain trust where India is looked at as the place when it comes to brain trust, it also matters in terms of how much of that IP gets created here in India. How much of those patents get generated here in the country.

And that, I think, is also super important—that we think through that IP creation. How do you go about it? Today we say 2,700 of the GCCs have their home in India, and a big part of the GCCs is building innovations from India for the world. I represent SAP here, and 40% of the SAP R&D is happening out of India for the world. But what's even more exciting is a quarter of the patents that come out of SAP globally comes out of our location.

And now, if you change into nationwide—the creation of IP—I think we talked a lot about the digital public infrastructures that exist today. I mean, if you just look at homegrown solutions, be it Aadhaar, where we are creating digital identities for more than a billion people today, we have everything that we need. You have the India Stack; you have the third largest startup ecosystem in the world; you have a phenomenal ecosystem of GCCs; you have the startups; you have the academia all coming together; and you have a market where innovations can be consumed as well.

So my second point—which I would really say that we are continuing to work on as a nation, and continuing to work on also in my role at NASSCOM—is to build that product-first thinking, which I think is super important. It's not enough to build, but we also need to know how to own what we create.

Now the third thing which I want to leave you with is: we can use AI as an equalizer. Because AI, if used in the wrong way, can become a divider. So it's super important for us that we leverage the technology in the right way so that we can have that as an equalizer for development. I mean, we talked about how we go into the villages of the country, bringing in the change, the transformation. And here again, technology has a significant role to play to drive that change at scale.

But here again, with the technologies that are evolving at such a high pace, if we don't bring in inclusive strategies, then we again leave out people. So I truly believe that we need to have that fair access; we need to have that linguistic diversity which is so much needed in our country. Focus on skilling again becomes very, very important, so that we can eliminate the social divides which can very quickly come up if technology is not used in the right way.

And if you think about the potential of using AI—be it in healthcare or education or financial equity—I think there's massive opportunity for us to use that in the right way. But it'll always also depend on how we use it in a responsible, in an ethical way, and how we train those models with the right set of data so that the bias that we sometimes see in societies around us does not result in the solutions that we provide.

So where does all of this leave us? Clearly, India's path forward is to become a product nation—that's my call to action—one that marries the scale and the discipline of our services legacy with the boldness of new-age IP creation, with the boldness of creating new digital products, new platforms. And I don't think this is a dream of any distant future or anything like that. This is something that is a responsibility for us—to do it in the right way at this point in time.

Because if you think about it, if India can shape the digital products of the future, we cannot just be the powerhouse of the economy—we can totally redefine how that economy will look.

Now, I want to leave you with one final thought, because if you just look at some of the greatest transformations that we have seen in the world—doesn't matter where it is—one thing is constant: it's the boldness with which you can drive that transformation. The courage that is needed to look beyond the successes of the past and to really reimagine the future that we are trying to build. And I truly believe that all of us here in India have that courage—the courage to innovate, the courage to take those risks, the courage to own our creations, and also to build a growth story that is truly inclusive, that is truly sustainable, and that is truly bold.

With that, thank you so much once again, and I wish you once again a great rest of the evening. And grateful once again to you, Mr. Kochhar. Thank you.

Participants at the Social Contract of Business & Governance