1. Gigantic human capital
Nilekani, who became one of the youngest entrepreneurs to join 20 global leaders on the prestigious World Economic Forum Foundation board and was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2006, said that the number one change in the mindset of India was with regard to population."
"Earlier, population was looked at as a burden and a lot of things that happened in the 1960s and 1970s -- like family planning and sterilization and the Emergency and so forth -- were all related to the belief that population was getting out of control and that it was actually a problem to have a large population."
"Today, the language has changed dramatically, and we no longer talk about population as a burden. We think of it as human capital. And, this has become even more critical because India is going to be the only young country in an aging world and that really makes a huge difference," he said.
He recalled that China's adoption of the 'one child policy' in the 1970s, which was very successfully implemented, has had consequences and led to rapid aging "and therefore China in fact will be aging more rapidly and really hitting its peak numbers in the next 5 to 10 years."
Nilekani said India, on the other hand, in the next 20 to 30 years would "have the largest pool of young people in the world even as the rest of the world is aging."
Image: Indian commuters alight from a suburban train at the Churchgate railway station in Mumbai. | Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images
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