Technology can fix India's problems: Nilekani

AUTHORSPEAK: Nandan Nilekani says his book is not for a non-democratic setup.

        

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Rajdeep Sardesai: In your book, you’ve written about higher education and labour laws. As we've seen these are also politically contentious, ideas, on which it’s difficult to build a consensus in democratic politics.

Nandan Nilekani: That is because they are being positioned on the wrong frame. I think if we look at them as issues to improve access then it becomes very fair, because ultimately this book is about improving access. More people should have more access to more education, more jobs, more infrastructure, markets and so on. That is very much a politically acceptable point.

Rajdeep Sardesai: That maybe acceptable but we've seen in higher education entire debate about say reservation quotas, we've seen it in labour laws over how much can you reform labour laws. I just wonder whether it might be easier to work with your ideas in a system which was perhaps less democratic, ironically?

Nandan Nilekani: In the book, in fact I am strong votive of democracy. The fact that English survived in India is because of democracy. Similarly, the fact that we don’t have a steep decline in the population like the Chinese but have a more gradual demographic dividend is because of democracy and the failure of the Nasbandi movement in the emergency. So actually democracy has stepped in many times to drive this. This is not a book for a non-democratic framework.

Rajdeep Sardesai: Yes, because you are a Nehruvian. You express your admiration for Nehru and yet you seem impatient at one level with the Nehruvian state.

Nandan Nilekani: No, I think Nehru did extraordinary work in terms of creating the structure of India, and democracy, secularism but as you look beyond that we have to carve out a new vision and that's what I say, if you look at India from the future and not from the past, it comes with a whole new paradigm.

Rajdeep Sardesai: Yes, but one of the challenges that face India is the kind of messy politics we have. Take for example, you speak about urban planning with a lot of passion and the need for us to have a clear vision for our cities which have become more and more important. Yet let’s take a slum re-regularisation scheme. No politician in our country is going to abandon a slum re-regularisation scheme because it’s a vote bank. So there’s a constant tension.

Nandan Nilekani: I don’t think that necessarily negates my point of view. All that I am saying is that if you are unable to execute the ideas that we have agreed upon and they are all very big ideas and if we can execute and resolve our ideas and anticipate our future based on what we've seen, we have a whole new paradigm that we can create. That’s really what the book is all about.