By IANS,
Chennai : India’s so-called unique selling proposition (USP) – democracy and young population – may not turn out to be true if the “half-finished economic reforms are left half-baked”, West Bengal Governor and former national security adviser M.K. Narayanan said Saturday.
“India’s democratic and demographic dividend of elected accountability and a large young population respectively as being our USP against countries like China may not come true. There is clearly both a need for more reforms and a battle of ideas to be won,” he said.
Narayanan was here to participate at the inauguration of Professor C.K.Prahalad Centre for Emerging India at the Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA).
“There is a need to ensure that India’s half-finished economic reforms do not turn out to be half baked. Freeing markets for products is not sufficient, and the reforms needed with regard to land, power, labour and capital will need a Prahaladian approach,” he said.
Citing the cautionary signal given by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum last year that India’s initial economic success becomes unsustainable with domestic, social and demographic pressures would soon trigger an economic reversal, Narayanan said the current internal turmoil cannot be treated as evanescent.
Referring to a management article written by Prahalad titled “The Blinders of Dominant Logic”, he said the principle equally applies to the business of intelligence prediction.
“I had always believed that mere reliance on computational analysis and inductive logic was insufficient to estimate the likelihood and the possible risk of possible developments taking place, just over the horizon of available knowledge,” he said.
According to him, there were far too many variables at play. One also needed to be contemplative, as well as be able to see with the mind’s eye.
Prahalad said dominant logic embedded in an organisaton could act as a blinder to peripheral vision. Managers need to look beyond the borders of their industries and geographies to find new opportunities and rethink the business logic.