‘India can have world’s largest trained manpower pool by 2022’

Management guru says country has potential to account for 10% of global trade, notes that it is income inequality and not poverty that must be addressed

If India assigns the focus required to entrepreneurship and innovation, then it has the potential to become the centre of global knowledge. This was the essence of the presentation, India @ 75, made here today by management guru C K Prahalad.

Painting a picture of what India can be in 2022, Prahalad, professor of strategy at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M Ross School of Business, said that higher growth could lead to higher inequality. He said this has subsequently led to the creation of a Naxal belt from Nepal to Telangana. Technological innovation and human capital formation can make India home to the world’s largest pool of trained manpower — this includes 200 million college graduates (16 per cent of the world), and a 500 million skilled workforce (40 per cent of the world). Prahalad added that universal literacy was essential to see this through.

If India manages to harness its entrepreneurial skills dexterously, the professor said the country would have all the ingredients required to produce not less than 30 Fortune 100 companies. Moreover, by 2022 it can look towards accounting for 10 per cent of international trade covering a range of products and services.

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On the top of it all, India can hope to become leaders in health education, energy, transportation, and sustainable development. All this may finally culminate in the flowering of art, literature, and science. Prahalad said the country could end up producing 10 Nobel laureates.

“Increasingly, India is becoming home for new business models — very low capital intensity, extremely low fixed costs, and conversion of fixed costs into variable costs. The bottom of the pyramid, 800 million Indians, can become a major source of breakthrough innovations,” he noted.

Delineating the emerging issues in the years ahead, he pointed out that income inequality rather than abject poverty will be the highlight in the years ahead. “An important consequence of rapid economic development and globalisation of the economy are the lags and symmetries in the resultant benefits. These asymmetries will create multiple, new divides in the society…as a consequence, income inequality will emerge as a source of social tensions,” he said.