Nandan Nilekani @ Lunch with the Financial Times
Nilekani argues that instead of suffering famines and the revolution that doom-mongers prophesied in the 1960s because of the huge growth of its population, India is positioned to benefit from the higher growth rates in gross domestic product that typically characterises a young working populace. More provocatively, Nilekani believes India has better prospects than China, whose one-child policy will, he observes, lead to a rapid ageing of its population, thus creating problems for its economy.
Lunch with the FT: Nandan Nilekani
By Rahul Jacob
It’s a very 21st century, new India moment. Arriving at Bon South restaurant in the affluent Koramangala neighbourhood in Bangalore, I receive a text message on the phone I have borrowed from my father. His mobile phone company has just sent a password that he needs to pay his bill online.
I call him but, as we are connected, Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of IT outsourcing giant Infosys Technologies, appears and says hello. Though conscious that I am keeping one of India’s best-known businessmen waiting, I elect to finish relaying the password before hanging up. I decide that Nilekani, as an evangelist of the view that India’s prospects can be transformed through investment in IT, would approve of the idea of my 76-year-old father paying his bill online.
We enter the minimalist white restaurant, its cool grey floors offering an immediate respite from the heat outside. Nilekani, 53, is dressed casually in a striped grey shirt and black chinos and loafers. He tells me he has only just arrived from the US that Monday morning, after a journey that started in Seattle on Saturday night. The trip, to promote his new book Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century, a manifesto for what India needs to do to succeed economically in the 21st century, included guest appearances on talk shows with Charlie Rose and Jon Stewart, who described him as part of a new breed of Indian (and Chinese) “overlords”.
Despite the travelling, Nilekani’s high-wattage energy level seems unaffected. In recent years, he has grown used to giving interviews about India and Asia’s ascendance everywhere from Davos (he has been on the board of the World Economic Forum since 2006) to talk shows in the US. How did he become a kind of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for the corporate set? “It has happened by default,” he says. “Being part of Infosys, which is a very global company, a lot of my job has been outside India meeting CEOs and top politicians. I got into this whole routine of explaining India and what’s happening in technology.”
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‘Imagining India’ is published in the UK on Thursday by Allen Lane and is available through the FT Bookshop at £20 plus p&p (RRP £25); tel: 0870 429 5884
