Saturday, February 04, 2006

President Kalam at the CII Summit

President Kalam gave this speech on the inauguration of the CII Summit. The point I found most interesting was his clear vision of how societal transformation and economic growth are interlinked, and what is needed to turn this linkage into a positive feedback.

"Knowledge societies enrich information society through innovation. Information society enriches agriculture and manufacturing through value addition. The whole purpose of education in a country is to develop and enhance the potential of our human resource and progressively transform it into a knowledge society."

Our society's steady (but slow?) move towards a knowledge society has been evidenced by a shift in the country's GDP from a predominantly agriculture based economy to a services based economy, and the decrease in agricultural employment. This decrease became possible with the availability of mechanised systems, better fertilizers, and more efficient pest control. To sum up, the move towards a knowledge based society was strengthened by the inter-connectivity between various sectors of the economy, that is, agriculture, manufacturing, and communication. To keep this going, President Kalam has identified four grids that have to be interlinked: knowledge grid, health grid, e-governance grid, and the PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) grid. These grids are as follows:

Knowledge grid: Interconnecting universities with socio-economic institutions, industries and R&D organisations.

Healthcare grid: Interconnecting the healthcare institutions of the government, corporate and superspeciality hospitals. Research institutions, educational institutions and ultimately, pharma R&D institutions.

E-governance grid: Interconnecting the central government and state governments and district and block level offices for G2G and G2C connectivity.

PURA knowledge grid: Connecting the PURA nodal centers with the village knowledge centres and domain service providers. Since this is the backbone for rural development, all other grids will infuse the knowledge into this grid for sustainable development, healthcare and good governance.

Interlinking these grids together will certainly improve the flow of information and accelerate new thoughts towards a better knowledge society.

1 Comments:

Blogger sarada said...

Since you have mentioned that social issues you can address, have you come across the impact of micro fanchising. I would like to know more about it. Has it helped employment generation. Whether corporates have benefitted? That is impact from both the sides.

Sarada

2:11 AM  

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