Ideas for 2023

Hopefully, budget 2023 accelerates investments, spurs consumption and moderates current account deficit catapulting India to double digit growth. While India’s performance was much better than many other countries, the return to normalcy was delayed We should temper expectations of any big surprise in the budget. India needs a striking rate of 8-9% income growth for the next 25 years to become a high-income economy. Another challenge could be climate shock, which can pound India’s vast agriculture sector, pushing millions into poverty A low carbon path would be key to hedge such future risks We need to focus on the ease of setting up manufacturing plants and bringing down the cost of operations while focusing on upskilling to emerge as a global manufacturing hub The nation needs a new vision in a new world The government can probably contribute to it, and the states can also add on to it. But if you think that GDP growth is going to accelerate because of the budget, I think that could be over ambitious.

 We need to focus on the ease of setting up manufacturing plants and bringing down the cost of operations while focusing on upskilling to emerge as a global manufacturing hub. The nation needs a new vision in a new world.

Lessons from Jacinda Ardern

In the resignation of Ms Jacinda Ardern, former Premier of New Zealand, there are valuable lessons for corporate leadership “I am not leaving because it’s hard,” she said. “I am leaving because with such a privileged job comes responsibility: the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also, when you are not.”

Her statement astonished everyone. In a world where we have seen leaders clinging on to their posts for dear life, by means fair or foul, Prime Minister Ardern’s statement was a shocker. I strongly believe that people should always keep their exit card in their pocket and carry on with their jobs, but only until one finds it interesting and have something substantial to contribute.

MMA Annual Convention 2023

Global food, energy and financial crises have been exacerbated by the climate crisis. India has a unique opportunity to lead from the front through one of the most influential platforms: G-20 Several priorities have been identified green development, climate finance, lifestyle for environment, accelerated inclusive and resilient growth, accelerating progress on sustainable development goals, and women-led development, etc

In this context the MMA Annual Convention on the theme “India’s Century: How To Drive Sustainable, Inclusive Growth?” focuses on three special sessions: Sustainable Growth With Energy Independence; Atmanirbhar Bharat – Accelerating Frontier Growth In Key Sectors (Defense & Aerospace manufacturing, Semicon Manufacturing and GiG economy); and Getting It Done – What Challenges Lie Ahead To Execute A MultiPoint Strategy? How Can India Mobilize (Human Resources, Financial Resources And Technology) To Achieve Aspirations?

The convention will help participants to gain insight into India’s growth story and the key factors driving sustainable inclusive growth. I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Mr K Mahalingam (Mali), Chairman, MMA Convention

 The MMA‐ACSYS and Super Auto Forge CSR initiative at government aided schools focussed on skills development at all levels. It’s our endeavor to provide the best environment for students to learn from the best trainers.

Committee and our Knowledge Partner, McKinsey & Company, for tirelessly working over the last few months to make the convention a grand success. I also thank the sponsors for their support in organizing the event Please watch the convention live on Saturday, 25th February 2023

Developing our schools

Alarming observations have been made in the recently released Annual Status of Education Report (ASER). A class five student is unable to read a class two level text book! It is a serious issue that will have a deteriorating and cascading impact on the future of our children There are serious indictments of the education system and schools should initiate immediate remedial actions before it is too late. The sharp rise in children enrolled in Government Schools is a positive outcome of the pandemic; the main reason being the usurious fee structure of private schools. It should be our endeavor to improve the standard of teaching at government and aided schools Only disruptive change in education could help us tackle joblessness. The long neglect of primary education has left us with deficient basic skills, and this needs to be addressed

The MMA-ACSYS and Super Auto Forge CSR initiative at government aided schools focussed on skills development at all levels. It’s our endeavor to provide the best environment for students to learn from the best trainers It will significantly enhance their pride and passion for learning. With the realization of such an initiative, removing barriers to accessibility will be an uphill, but not insurmountable, battle

Indian universities & the world

For a long time, proponents of internationalization of higher education have cherished the dream of foreign universities operating in India But, the idea failed to materialize due to the concerns of the regulatory authorities, governments and foreign higher educational institutions Opening up to the world means making India more visible on the global academic scene It also opens up implementing best practices from abroad. All this will take careful planning, abundant resources, and support from the central and state governments It also calls for a growing consciousness in the Indian academic community.

GST today & tomorrow

At Rs.1.5 lakh crore, the Goods and Service Tax (GST) inflows in Dec 2022 signals a recovery of the Indian services sector The GST council had met briefly after a long break but left with many critical reforms hanging. The council must be convened soon after the budget, not just to help sustain revenue inflows, but also to rationalize the rate structure In this context, MMA is organizing a presentation on the theme GST Today & Tomorrow by Mr K Vaitheeswaran, Advocate and Tax Consultant, to understand more about the complex issues connected with the implementation of GST and also about the changes ahead.

EV owners ’ dilemma!

EV owners are facing an unusual hurdle from their resident welfare associations. RWAs are spooked by instances of EV related fires and aren’t allowing charging infra to be setup. As EV ownership increases, it will be important for apartment complexes to be proactive in installing the charging infrastructure Otherwise, India’s EV story can hit a serious hurdle Apart from common electric fast chargers, there is a need for the grid infrastructure to be upgraded at the distribution level to support increased EV charging It’s a challenge big enough that demands a government policy to resolve the issue.

We urge you to constantly send in your feedback positive ones as well as criticisms, both equally important inputs in enabling us to get better at what we do.

As always, we would be happy to hear your views, comments and suggestions Happy Reading!!!

Data science is an emerging discipline with a plenty of job opportunities. Data scientists are trained practitioners in analysing data in the best possible way for facilitating good decisionmaking. In the US, data science has become ubiquitous and every university has a data science program of one sort or another You can think of data science as a tripod, according to the National Science Foundation Its three legs can be thought of as statistical methods, computing algorithms and domain discipline.

The world is full of uncertainty Statistical methods enable us to quantify uncertainty Computer science is what gives us efficient algorithms. So if computing algorithms and statistical methods pair up, then we have a coherent discipline, where we have efficient algorithms for handling complex, big, humongous, streaming data or any kind of data coming into play. We can forecast and do efficient decision making under the blanket of mathematical statistics or probability, so that you have confidence in what you are doing. It's not ad hoc. This is a disciplined way of doing things.

Academic institutions the world over are creating Data Science courses, degrees, institutes or colleges Students are overwhelmingly seeking data science degrees Industry and government are seeking to employ data science literate candidates. Prof Nalini Ravishanker, Department of Statistics, University of Connecticut, shares her experience with Data Science in recent years in a few application domains.

The third leg of the tripod is the domain discipline You could be running a marketing firm, a cybersecurity firm or a finance operation that produces data. If you want to analyse it well, in order to make decisions, then perhaps you should think about this new discipline that is cropping up called data science.

Good data scientists are definitely very savvy data analysts who facilitate decision making under uncertainty Earlier, data engineers did all the warehousing. They brought the data, cleaned it up and brought it to the table. Then the data was passed to the analysts who did all the statistics and computer algorithms But that division is becoming fuzzy now Today, a data scientist most likely has to do some data engineering as well. They also need to talk to one another Everyone is looking to hire data scientists If you train yourself in data science, you will have a job. There are tons of places where data science is being done these days

Case Study 1: Freeze Loss Mitigation

We did IoT data analysis for an insurance firm to mitigate insurance loss. The IoT data came across time. Thus, it is time series analysis done in collaboration with a company called The Hartford Steam Boiler (HSB), which is in Hartford, Connecticut, near my University. I've been working with this company since 2019 on this project, which concerns freeze loss mitigation Pipes freezing is a very common problem in the cold parts of the United States. The water pipes may break and the whole house or your building gets flooded It is a catastrophe for the client and the insurance firm, which has to pay out huge settlements. The whole idea from the insurance firm’s point of view is about what I can do at the client's place to bring down this risk of freeze loss. Here is the idea: HSB will install sensors in some locations in a building where they can detect the temperature The client will have to monitor it The temperature inside the building will be transmitted back to HSB. There will be engineers and other analysts looking at their dashboards and computers, looking if there is a potential for a freeze If the temperature gradient keeps going down, then they would alert the customer by a telephone call or a text message. Then they sit and hope that the insured person will take action, hopefully go and raise the thermostat in their house. The problem is, no client is going to take the time to call HSB and say, “Thank you for the alert. I just fixed the problem ” So HSB is left guessing

And here is where they seek help from a data analyst. They know what the temperature trajectory looks like. They also know what the outside temperature looks like They came to us and said, “You call yourself time series experts Can you use this information and tell us how and when to alert the customer first? And second, can you tell by just looking at the data before the alert and after the alert, whether the customer at the other end could have taken action or not?”

It seemed like a tall order. But that's how data science works This project was a joint venture between people in computer science and statistics. I was involved with the head of the Computer Science department He and I formed a team, with our graduate students For the last four years, we've been tackling problems like this.

Need for Effective Alerts

The data ranges from 2020 to 2021, covering just the winter months in the US. HSB installed 509 sensors with at least one alert event, spanning 38 States, 28 parent companies and 28 device locations (like kitchen, basement, etc ) Our team has integrated machine learning methods (ML) with statistical inferential methods to produce effective alerts Imagine you watch a movie in your house or take a nap. An alert keeps coming. A false alarm can get really irritating. It's just like crying wolf The next time real alert happens, you will ignore it Effective alerts are not false alarms

We came up with a method to modify an existing machine learning algorithm to reduce the number of false alerts The second thing we did was to detect the action taken by the insured, after the alert The pattern of the insured’s data may or may not change. So we compared the before-data with the afterdata, again, using statistical ideas, to say whether, with a high probability, we think the customer took action or not The methodology we use is called causal impact methodology in a Gaussian process modelling framework.

The third thing that we did was clustering the sensors Imagine there are 1000s of sensors and they keep growing every week We can cluster the sensors, according to the behaviour of the temperatures. For instance, out of the 4000 sensors, 600 behave one way; 400 behave another way and so on That is useful for a variety of reasons. Here we use data science algorithms called nearest neighbour methods. All our work is generally coded in Python and/or R This work was done with Python code The first deliverable was better alerts to customers. (Fig: Deliverable 1)

Between October and February, the external temperature is quite low There is always the possibility that pipes might freeze The internal temperature is higher because we all live in heated buildings. But there are points where the internal temperature is dipping For some reason, we begin to suspect that it can go further and the customer is alerted at this point.

Suddenly, after this, there seems to be a jump up and then it starts to fluctuate again So, basically what we think is that the customer took action Obtaining this alert was through isolation forest plus algorithm that we developed We use something called data thresholding and distance based filtering. We cleverly used the correlation between outside temperature and inside temperature Of course, there are lots of equations involved

The second deliverable (Fig: Deliverable 2) is to detect customer action by just looking at the temperatures There are four scenarios that you can see: True Positive, True Negative, False Positive and False Negative. The next thing that we do is to set clustering sensors. In a neighbourhood system, we come with a distance metric It is like saying if somebody is close to me or not close to me People that are close to me, come into the same cluster. People that are far away belong to different clusters. Heuristically, we were able to cluster the different temperature data into six different groups They are useful for people analysing the data.

The R method also allows us to come up with new clusters As new data comes in, they don't have to fall into the same groups as before Week by week, we start learning. So, this is a dynamic learning process, where we have used all kinds of tools and models to understand the data In summary, although I took a very simple example of IoT temperatures that an insurance company is using, the methods are very general and fundamental We have R code and Python code on our GitLab link that people can leverage and try and apply and see if it works This can be applied in many disciplines

Case Study 2: Marketing Promotion

When a firm gives promotions, how effective are they? To which kind of customers should they give promotions or should they stop giving promotions? We call this as the promotion effectiveness study. The data is from a leading personal care manufacturer who spends lots of money and wants to know the increase in revenue to justify the increase in promotional spends Can they quantify it for different time periods? That is the new thing we can bring to the table. We can do it in a hierarchical way for different retail outlets, different channels, different regions and so on and find out how to optimise the promotional spends

The study is done in collaboration with a company called Cogitaas AVA. It's a Mumbai based consulting company. The selling is done on four sales channels: general trade, general trade-wholesale, modern trade and super stockist. The data is monthly, over 36 months. The previous thing we saw was a 15 minute data over a long period of time That is high frequency data This is just monthly data, the kind of data many retailers might use on volume, sales, price, number of retailers, etc. There are about 15 or 17 regions in India, like Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu

As a data analyst, the first thing you do is visualization, using bar graphs. We looked at the regional distribution in the x axis and the channels in the y axis We can see in which state, which one is dominant We can also do it by region and channel We see spikes followed by depression. If there is a promotion, the sales increase.

We also look at trade promotions both deep and shallow discounts given to retailers to increase distribution and not to the end customer. We did for different products and modelled the sales in week t - week by week There is advantage in looking at data as it comes over time We modelled the sales for 104 weeks under four channels for 17 regions. We built static and dynamic time series statistical models.

The client believed that a unified management could be cost saving The data scientists are not doing any analysis as standalone but reacting to the client’s needs. So if the client gives us the mandate, we think of the best way to implement the client's request So we clustered different regions and used similar statistical models within each of those clusters.

The model that you build for Tamil Nadu need not be the model you build for Gujarat They could all have their own little models. The dynamic model identifies time periods of above average and below average impact because our goal is to see the impact of promotional spend on sales We are able to assess in which periods of time, the impact is high and in which periods of time the impact is low and for which channel it is high, low, etc This kind of deep dive will help the firm to understand better and track the promotional dollars. One of the deliverables was the dynamic impact of spends by channel and region.

We can do all the slicing and dicing with the kind of models that we build Then we can create dashboards for firms. They can click the channel or region and see exactly what is happening and get their ROI calculations, which is the final output We can also do this for E-commerce platforms and dynamically measure the impact on sales and identify campaigns that deliver healthy ROI The dynamic time series modelling is becoming a routine part of data science

When you think about data, the data wrangling is a common term we use. Then the next step is developing an effective analysis modelling framework to tackle the questions; computation–coding with speed and accuracy; and then creating a dashboard In almost every situation, the firm would expect the data analyst to help with the automation and create a dashboard with some interactive tools for their people to use

 We can have healthy industry‐academia partnerships. Firms like HSB or Cogitaas partner with academia. The firms can provide interesting open problems, which can be used as course projects or as capstone projects.

Academic‐Industry Collaboration

From an academic point of view, what are the outcomes that people like me see from collaborations with industry?

• First of all, we advance the science, because we develop new methods. Every time, someone from a firm comes to us with a problem and that problem cannot be solved by existing methods effectively, there is an opportunity to develop new methods. That pushes the science forward

• We can also develop code, which is very useful

If everyone keeps on coding the same algorithm over and over again, it’s a waste of human resource So the code is developed and shared People can use code that is available and then automate the methods for deployment.

• That is also a useful tool for our students to learn We train graduate students in data science for the workforce.

• We also produce publications to push the science and put the work that we have done in the public domain

• We can have healthy industry-academia partnerships. Firms like HSB or Cogitaas partner with academia (UConn DS) The firms can provide interesting open problems, which can be used as course projects or as capstone projects. 

If I'm worried about losing my key customers, can we have alerts to say, ‘Watch out. This customer could potentially leave.”

You're talking about churn. There are many well‐known models for churn What methods one uses will depend on the kind of data that one is able to get

What are your expectations of students applying for the data science programs?

My university as well as any other university that starts these programs would have some gateway Many US ins tu ons make it as open as possible. We are not saying that only sta s cs undergraduates or computer science undergraduates should apply In the curriculum, for example, in my university, we have differen al calculus, an intro course in sta s cs and some training in R and Python. Some quan ta ve literacy is definitely necessary Many universi es offer an intro to data science course, which levels the field and makes those who join, at least, minimally competent, so that when they start taking next level courses, they could catch on

My own experience this year has been that when I taught applied sta s cs for data science students, there was deep silence for the first few weeks Any me I would ask a ques on, the class would just stare back at me and I was scared. But then you would be surprised at how things changed Towards the end, if I asked a ques on, there were six hands shoo ng up The students are very resilient and they catch up very fast.

How important is data cleaning in the context of the big data world that we are all living in?

It’s very important because we all know that it is garbage in, garbage out So we need to put good data into the modelling First of all, there is a lot of missing data.

Then we have to come up with good methods for impu ng. We must look at the data from different points of view with checks and balances Everything has to gel We spend a lot of me making sure that the data is kosher before we trust and put it into a model.

Is the intro to data sciences course a preparatory course for MS program in the US or is it a standalone course offered by the university?

The intro to data science will be the first course that the ‘masters’ students take a er they enroll and come to the program. The performance in the intro course is not necessarily a gateway to enroll for the MS program. The intro to data science carries three credits out of the 30 credits in our program.

How do you ensure the genuineness of the data? Will you be able to identify if the firm is deliberately giving wrong data?

We look in many ways and do lots of checks and balances I think if a firm works with me, I'm hoping that they are not falsifying the data. If we suspect that the data may be falsified, there are ways in which we can detect. We can look for consistency across me and do some pa ern recogni on

How do you address issues that come because of using data from multiple data sources? How do you deal with data security?

Dealing with mul ple data sources is very easy. We start building models using hierarchy Data privacy and security is a very cri cal thing today for the clients. My university does not want to take responsibility for storing client data on our premises So all of our analysis is done on the company’s machines No data comes into the university.

Moonlighting is a serious issue now. How can we prevent employees dealing in data science, from passing on the data to a competitor?

Companies generally make sure that you can only access the data with a computer and you cannot pull out any data from there You have to do the modelling within the system. The permissions must be provided in such a way that even if you want to, you cannot take anything out of that data We also have to sign MOUs There are very strict laws Even before we start the work, there has to be a contract.

We come across cases where the client has a lack of clarity on the business problem. How can we solve this issue?

We get clarity through dialogues The first few weeks goes in a dialogue between the two par es That is why perhaps you need an experienced person. Conver ng a management problem into a data science problem calls for skills and requires a lot of interac ons and dialogue. It takes some me Once you narrow it down and clearly define the problem, then the solu ons are bang on So when you implement it back into your company, you get excep onal results

How do you get value out of data science? How would you advise the students who want to pursue a career in the field of data science?

I am a sta s cian, a half data scien st as per my defini on I would, of course, say it's very, very valuable. The workplace needs data scien sts We know that things change. Once upon a me, Physics was the king Then Bio became the king Now everybody wants a trained data scien st That is why the universi es are all responding by opening data science programs, including IIT Madras. There is a need and, therefore, if the students are willing to invest a year or year and a half of their me to study data science, they will get jobs 

The transition towards a Green Economy presents a tremendous scope for India to not only achieve the SDGs and advance its lowcarbon development objective but also with a vision for an ‘inclusive green economy’. A look at some of the issues, challenges and opportunities present in the sector

Caring for the biosphere and atmosphere

Prof S Janakarajan

President, South Asia Consor um for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies (SaciWATERs), Hyderabad

The UN organizations have been extensively discussing green economy. For achieving growth and development, there is competition within the country between the states and also between countries. However, growth should not come at the cost of sustainability We have to think of feeding about 800 billion people in the world. If we don’t ensure international biodiversity and food security, feeding these people will become a huge challenge For transitioning towards green economy, we must sustain life systems on the earth and convert to low carbon economy, thus making the planet more livable, sustainable,

Renewable And Friendly Towards Life Systems

That's the core of the green economy. The most important aspect is to work towards rebuilding, rehabilitating, recovering and restoring the health of planet earth, as we have contributed to a great damage to our planet.

15 years ago, the concept of green economy did not exist But today, everybody is talking about greening This has major implications for the entire biosphere and atmosphere, healthy lifestyles, biodiversity, food security and protection from disasters Biosphere includes lithosphere, hydrosphere and also the soil systems. Prioritization and implementation of the green economy initiatives need more attention; more so, in the Western Europe, North America, Russia, Japan, China and India. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN provide clear cut pathways towards achieving green economy SDG 7 focusses on affordable and clean energy; SDG 11 on sustainable cities and communities; SDG 12 on responsible production and consumption pattern and SDG 13 on climate action

India’s strides in wind and solar

To make energy transition to renewable energy such as solar, onshore and offshore wind power and green hydrogen, we require investments. India had the set the target of installing 175 GW of wind and solar energy by 2022 Though we are slightly behind target, we are expanding pretty rapidly in energy generation from wind and solar, which is a laudable achievement. India now stands fourth in the world in installed renewable capacity fifth in solar and the fourth in wind. India has set a target of achieving domestic renewable energy of 450 GW by 2030 40% of India's cumulative electric power installed capacity will come from non-fossil fuel-based energy by 2030. Now 70% of our energy is generated from coal, which is fossil-based but we have to reduce it.

Secondly, India wants to reduce the emission intensity of its GDP by 33 to 34% of the 2005 level by 2040 Is it achievable? India will create an additional carbon sink of 2.3 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent to additional forest cover These are tough targets but let's look at them positively

Challenges from green hydrogen

Green hydrogen is now widely talked about globally and the Government of India is quite serious about using it as a source of energy. The union cabinet has recently allowed an outlay of Rs 19,744 crore towards the National Green Hydrogen Mission. It means that India wants to be a global hub for production, utilization and export of green hydrogen The green hydrogen policy aims to generate 5 million tons of green hydrogen annually from 2030 onwards, which is the quantity of hydrogen consumed by the industry today. Green hydrogen is produced by splitting the water (H2O) into hydrogen and water. For that, we need electrolysers of 32 GW capacity; it will consume 150 million litres of potable water We must set up 90 GW of solar or wind power to feed the electrolysers, which in turn would need 3,40,000 hectares of land.

If we use regular energy for powering the electrolysers, it will not be green anymore The benefit of using green hydrogen is that we can avoid 30 to 40 million tons of CO2 emission and also purchase of 60,000 crores of LNG. But how is that going to be possible and do we need green hydrogen at all are the questions that come up, more so because hydrogen storage is hazardous and its distribution through a leakproof pipe system and end-use acceptance are further challenges.

The higher growth rates and India’s vision of $5 trillion economy are based on the usage of conventional carbon-based energy When we switch to renewable energy, there can be a conflict with this target of $5 Tn economy. Indian economy is growing at a much faster rate compared to most of the world economies We are growing at 7 to 8% and expect further growth, which means we are going to use more energy According to the International Energy Agency, India's energy demand will go up by 3% annually. The International Energy Agency also predicts that coal based energy generations will go up from 240 GW to 2000 GW in 2030

Making agriculture efficient

Substantial energy can be saved by making the Indian agricultural practices more efficient At the moment, Indian agriculture is extremely inefficient. If we make it more efficient, we can reduce a lot of methane emission and also electricity use for agricultural purposes When we shift to electric vehicles, we still use the fossil energy to recharge batteries. The batteries’, being hazardous, disposal becomes a challenge More people switching to electric vehicles will increase traffic congestion. So we must shift towards public transport.

If we have dedicated bus lanes, then people will be tempted to use the public transport That is the best way to reduce CO2 emission. China and many European countries are shifting towards bicycles There are extremely well made bicycles available. If we have dedicated bicycle lanes, people would like to go by bicycle. Now we are scared to ride a bicycle on the road, as we can be hit by any class of vehicle These are unconventional methods and ways of looking at greening and transitioning towards green economy

Waste management

Waste management is another serious issue. We generate huge biomedical waste, solid waste, debris from buildings, industrial waste, liquid waste and other kinds of waste. These wastes generate quite a lot of methane Our solid waste tradition has gone up by 20% because of online purchases that use so much of packing materials. With higher growth rates, we will also end up using more natural capital, land and water Domestic sewage problem and unscientific disposal of industrial solid waste effluent can also create serious problems. While working on infrastructure development, we encroach water bodies and create further problems. It is also important that we work on more responsible production and consumption SDG 12 says that we must work on making every industrial unit energy positive and water positive. They should generate their own energy and use their own water

The sunlight and the rain that falls on your roof and plot of land are your resources. Use them to the greatest and be kind to mother earth That's the easiest way to move towards green economy

Whatever we do, we are all connected.

Dr Shankar M Venugopal

Vice President, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd

Does green and economy go together?

That's a very first question that many of us may have. The other day, I thought of taking my cycle out and going to work. I happen to live in the same campus and my home is just ten minutes away from my office So cycling is possible

Green economy an oxymoron?

When I said this to my neighbour, he looked at me very disapprovingly and sent me a WhatsApp forward. It said that a cyclist does not contribute to the economy in any way He doesn't buy a car, has no car loan, doesn't buy fuel, doesn't pay road tax or parking fee. If there is somebody who can do more damage to the economy, it is the guy who walks On the contrary, if you look at fast food outlets, they create a big impact on the economy, because people eat junk food, they fall sick, buy medicines, go to doctors and the economy booms This is really put in a humorous way but it's supposed to make us think. I come from the world of mobility, where unless we move things and people, there is no economic growth. We have to do it in a responsible way, where there is no tailpipe emission and it is energy efficient I work for Mahindra, so I'm very excited about building electric vehicles where there is no emission There are still problems to be solved with EVs as Prof Janakarajan pointed out How do we solve them?

Almost every week, I have to go from Bangalore to Chennai and back For the last few weeks, I have been using the Vande Bharat Express. Train, I think is the greenest way to go. I am also able to work during those four hours of travel It's pretty nice But it's a fundamental change and it needs a mind shift to see is there an alternative to traveling. In tourism, there are virtual things that are coming up with AR, VR and metaverse.

The world is one

Six months ago, I was in Delhi Almost every house has multiple air conditioners Even during the night time, when I stepped out, it was pretty warm outside, like the day in Chennai For the person inside the house, it’s very cool and comfortable. But for the person outside, it is horrible. That's what happens, when it comes to green When we talk about green economy, one thing that we should remember is the phrase Vasudhaiva Kudambakkam, which means the whole world is one family Whatever we do, we are all connected There is no way one can avoid the butterfly effect. We need to understand that it's a system level problem that we are trying to solve It's not a local problem What happens in one end of the globe is definitely going to affect something at the other end.

The lithium story

Coming back to the electric mobility, one thing that have all recognised is that we cannot continue to use coal powered electricity to charge electric cars We're looking at solar and wind in a very big way. But the catch is that solar or any renewable needs storage You need a battery, typically a lithium ion battery to store the energy and you need the same battery also for the electric vehicles. Certainly, there is double the demand for lithium ion batteries

There are only four places in the world where lithium is available in plenty Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Australia. China is not there in this picture All that China has is a long term trade agreement with these countries to process lithium and make batteries. For a vehicle which needs instant energy, lithium battery makes a lot of sense There could be alternatives soon, but today, that's the best. This is the story around lithium. We need to mitigate some of the supply risk around lithium before we start scaling it up

The second point is in terms of battery wastage, because battery has a finite life. There are multiple things that people are trying to do around this One is what we call a second life of the battery. Once the battery health deteriorates to less than 80%, it can be used for the home inverter kinds of applications and it can serve for another five to six years in a home inverter.

We have companies, which can retrieve almost 90% of the material that goes into a lithium ion battery. One such company is Redwood Materials. There are quite a few companies who have metallurgical processes in place to retrieve and reuse these scarce materials to make fresh batteries. That is possible. That's a big business opportunity for a country like India, so we can really recycle and reuse these batteries Traditionally, we are good in materials and metallurgy technologies This is a strength area for us and we can very well look at it. There's a lot of money around that.

The third is, just because we have an electric car, the traffic congestion does not come down It is still there How can we address this? The electric car will also be a smart and connected car, since it has IoT. It can talk to other cars, to traffic signals, to parking lots, to charging stations and so on. That's going to solve two big problems. One is to streamline the traffic flow, so that the signals and the vehicles talk to each other and they can plan Second, the car being connected, it can talk to the charging station and find out the availability of the charging slot The charging station will also know how much charge is remaining in the battery of the car. The OEM serves like an umbilical cord for all these electric cars, so you will never be alone even on a highway or any new place. You are always connected and there is always help available. So we have to look at electric not as standalone, but as connected and shared mobility

A shared vehicle can be used for longer hours. That's faster and better utilization and faster return on investment That's why a lot of the shared mobility providers like the Olas and Ubers are very excited about electric. Electric car can also be semi-autonomous where it can drive to some extent by itself and optimize, so you can get better efficiencies

Think green, speak green, act green

It’s very important for us to look at public transportation and how to make them electric

Sustainable mobility means that it must be sustainable at all levels including design, manufacturing and end of life disposal. India has a true potential to be a global leader, when it comes to green technologies Green economy is the opportunity that we just cannot afford to miss. For that, we have to think green, speak green, spread the awareness and enable green We need to practice green habits right from home. All of us have a chance to contribute to this and we can all come up with innovative ideas I'm sure there are a lot of people who are ready to invest, looking for green technologies and green ideas.

For a ‘Just Transition’

Mr Arjun Bhargava Consultant, UN Global Compact

Launched in 2000 by former UN Secretary

General Kofi Annan, the UN Global Compact was initiated to bring business and the UN together to give a human face to the global market As a special initiative of the UN Secretary General, the United Nations Global Compact is a call to companies everywhere to align their operations and strategies with 10 principles of the UN Global Compact in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption derived from international agreements and conventions With more than 17,000 companies, and 3000 non-business signatories based in over 160 countries and 69 local networks, the UN Global Compact is the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative, uniting business for a better world

As India transitions to a net zero economy, we have to ensure that we keep people and job creation at the heart of this transition. The green economy focuses on the economy, investment, capital and infrastructure, employment and skills and positive social and environmental outcomes. And therefore, to move towards a green economy, we must ensure that any transition is inclusive.

According to the International Labour Organization, a ‘Just Transition’ means greening the economy in a way that is as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned, creating decent work opportunities and leaving no one behind A Just Transition involves maximizing the social and economic opportunities of climate action while minimizing and carefully managing the challenges, including through effective social dialogue among all groups impacted and respect for fundamental labour principles and rights

Guidelines for a ‘Just Transition’

To avert catastrophic climate change, we need to halve the global emissions by 2030 If we fail to do so, we will not have a fighting chance of keeping temperature rise to 1.5 degrees and avoid the devastating impacts of climate change It's important for companies in the decarbonisation journey to set a science based emission reduction targets in line with climate science. 110 Indian companies from India have either committed to or have set science based targets out of over 4000 globally.

Now, as companies in all sectors work to drastically reduce pollution from fossil fuel use, they must also simultaneously ensure there will be positive impacts for their employees, workers and communities. It's important to equip labour market to the high level skill sets needed for greener jobs This includes services that are available and easily accessible to all, including adequate training and professional development services and reskilling workers

Think lab on ‘Just Transition’

According to the ILO, 25 million new jobs can be created with the loss of only about 7 million With people at the heart of the transition, we at the UN Global Compact launched a Think Lab on Just Transition at COP 26 in Glasgow We have brought 27 companies from across the world, in which three are from India, namely ReNew Power, Wipro and the Mahindra Group, along with over 15 civil society and international organizations such as the ILO, International Organization of Employers, the International Trade Union Confederation, among others

Sustainable development means harnessing opportunities to generate green jobs with decent working conditions, to reskill and upskill the workforce to promote gender and social equity and inclusion, to reduce poverty and to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals. Just Transition also means fairly managing the transition’s economic and social impacts and risks This includes risks to business assets and infrastructure, job losses, and decent job deficits, risks to human rights, including land rights and indigenous people’s rights and other negative impacts, especially in society's most vulnerable groups.

Assessing, preventing and mitigating negative impacts on workers, frontline communities, and enterprises should be an integral component of climate action. So by embedding a just process into the net zero transition, harnessing its social and economic opportunities and fairly managing its impacts on people, a Just Transition facilitates a speedy transition Moreover, private sector support for a Just Transition benefits people It also benefits business. Just Transition can help companies reduce risks and costs, enhance productivity, improve stakeholder alignment, including with customers, policymakers and investors and mitigate systemic risks.

Brief for businesses: 7 key actions

In September 2022, the Think Lab on Just Transition launched its first deliverable, The Introduction to Just Transition A Brief for Businesses, which builds on the ILO guidelines and provides an introduction to the central role of the private sector in ensuring a Just Transition for all Climate change and climate transition affect geographies, industries, and individual companies in different ways. It's important to note that the principles of Just Transition are universal But companies and business functions apply them differently. Our introduction to Just Transition highlights some of these differences and outlines seven priority actions to help all companies understand Just Transition’s principles, identify gaps in current practices, and generate ideas for improving alignment

1 Make a map of internal touch points and priorities on Just Transition.

2. Set a foundation through robust policies and practices to respect rights at work and other human rights and ensure responsible business conduct.

3. Engage with your worker organizations, governments and all stakeholders affected about these transition plans

4. Make long-term business plans that integrate these Just Transition principles, mitigate negative impacts and maximize opportunities for your key stakeholders.

5. Take action to carry out Just Transition plans

6 Partner with governments, employer organizations, regional and sectoral initiatives and across supply chains for more coordinated action

7 Measure and report actions, challenges and impacts related to Just Transition to promote learning and accountability even with your peers

India’s grand vision

India's vision is to achieve net zero emissions by 2070. In addition to attaining short-term targets, which include among others increasing renewables’ capacity to 500 GW by 2030, and meeting 50% of energy requirements from renewables, India updated its contribution to the Paris Agreement, which is also called the Nationally Determined Contribution or NDC in August 2022 and has embarked on new initiatives in renewable energy, e-mobility, ethanol blended fuels and green hydrogen as an alternative energy source. Sustainable lifestyles and climate justice to protect the poor and vulnerable from adverse impacts of climate change are also addressed in the NDC

It is important for the private sector to plan for a people-centered response to support

India's bold and ambitious renewable energy targets and broader climate commitments Planning for a Just Transition is more critical for some industries, such as those in the energy sector For example, there's a need to reskill automotive workers for electric vehicle industry as well.

Climate adaptation

A Just Transition for climate adaptation is also needed as the impacts of climate change are not just. The poorest and already vulnerable and are most affected by these impacts They also have the least means to adapt and are less likely to benefit from adaptation action due to structural inequalities and limited political and economic capabilities Climate change exacerbates existing inequalities including those related to gender, income, age and ethnicity.

Historically, adaptation action has been seen as the responsibility of local and national governments But globalization provides daily examples of how climate adaptation is actually a broader global concern, when floods disrupt the production of semiconductors or the export of minerals and metals; when heat waves and droughts make wheat yields shrink and prices rise. Businesses are directly affected by climate impacts cascading through supply chains

Climate change and misguided adaptation action can cause resource scarcity and affect human health, hunger, crop yields and mining and processing facilities They can jeopardize jobs and livelihoods, exacerbate conflict and cause supply chain disruptions. This is why adaptation action is important for large multinational corporations that aim to achieve a Just Transition. A Just Transition strategy for businesses that integrates climate adaptation; it can help reduce unequal burdens and leave no one behind

7 Ways For Climate Adaptation

A second business brief titled Just

Transition for Climate Adaptation developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute with inputs from partners and company participants in the Think Lab on Just Transition makes recommendations for businesses to achieve a fair and inclusive journey to a net zero and resilient future. This brief also outlines seven recommendations for businesses to achieve a Just Transition for climate adaptation They are:

1 Integrate social and environmental objectives into business strategy through social dialogue.

2 Build coalitions, including with your competitors, because you face similar challenges.

3. Improve data collection and sharing.

4. Strengthen supply chain resilience.

5 Finance a Just Transition on climate adaptation

6. Partner with local and regional governments to devise adaptation strategies that advance a Just Transition

7 Advocate for clear division of responsibilities for a Just Transition and support climate adaptation.

In December, we launched financing a Just Transition, a third business brief, which explores how financial functions within companies and institutions can advance a Just Transition by addressing four core elements of operations & strategy, governance, risk management and metrics & targets. 

Mr. Chittaranjan Chattopadhyay Chairman, BFSIB

The Prime Minister on 15th August gave a clarion call that India has to be a developed nation by 2047. That's why India@100 has become a new slogan Three spells of Covid disrupted the economy like anything. One sector, at the cost of as many as 1000 lives, has helped the country to remain intact India is one of the nations that surprised the whole world as to how this country could sustain despite Covid. Major credit goes to the BFSI sector and to the bankers From the ICAI, we have started a journey to handhold the bankers to the financial services sectors and to the insurance sectors. Our institute always feels that it shall not only cater to the CMA professionals but it shall also have to be connected with the people who are the stakeholders of this country.

India’s economy is slated to double its growth rate in the coming decade and the country would be the third largest economy by 2027 Is the banking sector poised to keep up with the pace of growth? A group of eminent speakers from the sector shed light on the risks, responsibilities, threats and opportunities

Mr. P Raju Iyer Past President, ICAI

Today knowledge is power ICAI is for the development of technical papers and technical support, wherever it is required With Ramchandra University, we have started a course on healthcare management Whoever completes the course will be able to perform better in hospital management, which is now a 5 star industry and growing very fast We are entering into other areas also like agriculture. We are entering into a MOU with IGNOU to start a course on agriculture management We are entering into a lot of MOUs with various Universities and colleges, so that our youth can be developed with knowledge We have submitted our report for the Budget 23, taking inputs from the industries along with possible solutions, to the Ministry of Finance with whom we had a meeting last month. Global policies are powered by nations. The nation’s progress is powered by economy. Economy is powered by industries Industries are powered by competition Products and services are powered by employee productivity. Employee productivity is powered by employee motivation Employee motivation is powered by management stewardship which is powered by quality leaders. Quality leaders are powered by us, the professionals

Mr. Vijendar Sharma President, ICAI

When any corporate starts a business with a debt equity ratio of 1.5, it means that if promoter contributes one rupee, the banker will contribute 1.5 rupee. When the economy is growing, we always give the credit to the corporates but it is the banker who is supporting the corporate and indirectly controlling the economy also. During covid, there were three people on the road. One was the doctor Second was the police officer to manage the affairs and the third was the banker. While we were sitting at home comfortably without facing any sort of scarcity, our bankers were there working full time, supporting our economy and country as a whole. Without bankers, we are unable to maintain even the local balance Because of global competition, it is very important that our product cost should be restricted. It means that the pricing of the product is decided by the competitor In 2016, the Government of India introduced the IBC: Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. By that time, we have written off about 10 lakh crores from the bank systems. It doesn't mean that whatever has been written off, we are not going to recover. We are going to recover from the people either from their personal or company assets branded a third world country, India is now the fifth largest economy in the world As per the prediction of Morgan Stanley, we are slated to double our growth rate in the coming decade and we would be the third largest economy by 2027 India has risen to 46th position in the global innovation index and has emerged as a third largest ecosystem for startups after the US and China with around 84 active startups in India attaining the status of unicorns between 2018 and 2022. Also, as a jewel in the crown, India has assumed the Presidency of G20, which is a premier forum for international economic cooperation, which includes world's major and systemically important economies.

The role of a banker is very challenging As cost auditors and management accountants, we must support the bankers. A balance sheet is not very useful for the banker as it tells what happened in the last one year For the banker, it is very important to see how my investment is safe and secure. So, it's very important that we should produce some sort of report in the hands of the bankers that can tell about the future prospects of the company. We are submitting Cost Audit Report to the Government of India which is a confidential report. Technology is changing fast and it decides the fate of any product and economy. We are developing a technical reporting system mechanism for the bankers, and it will tell which product has completed its life cycle and which one will be the future cash cow.

Evolution of banking in India

It is impossible for any sector to flourish and grow without a robust banking setup, be it the managing the funds of the retail or corporate sector or providing great facilities through various schemes. The banking sector has always been the protector as well as a provider of funds for the country

Mr. B.Ramesh Babu MD & CEO, KVB

Transformation today, revolves around the need to generate new value, to unlock new opportunities, to drive new growth and to deliver new efficiencies Once

Our banking sector’s evolution can be traced in three phases. The first phase is preindependence, second is post-independence till 1991 and the third is post-reforms Coming to the last two decades of the banking, the Indian banking industry witnessed the rollout of innovative banking models like payments and small finance banks In addition to many outreach programs for an inclusive growth, major banking sector reforms like digital payments, mobile banking, etc , and the rise of Indian NBFCs and Fintech have significantly enhanced India's financial inclusion.

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The banking sector also ensured the economic machinery was sufficiently oiled by keeping the branches on and working even during the peak of pandemic, when the entire country was under lockdown.

This also stresses the requirement of partnership between banks and fintech. The digital payment system in India has evolved the most among 25 countries, with India's IMPS being the only system rated at level five (highest) in the Faster Payment Innovations Index. India's UPI has also revolutionized realtime payments and strives to increase its global reach in recent years, while Application Programming Interface has enabled access of seamless banking to the customers, within a matter of seconds

Shift in banking

In fact, UPI and Aadhar Enabled Payment System (AePS) has brought in a dramatic shift in consumer behaviour and usage, as around 400 million people tap into these digital technologies So while we spread the credit blanket and reach out to every nook and corner of the country, banks have tightened their due diligence methods to ensure clear balance sheets Corporates have understood their requirements in view of the various actions taken. Also bad credit history can have an adverse ripple effect on them. This has led to the gross NPA of the Scheduled Commercial Banks falling to a six year low of 5 9% in March ‘22 and would fall further to 5.3% by March ‘23, according to the Financial Stability Report of RBI published recently During the pandemic, the government not only ensured that medical facilities were made available in every part of the country, but we even successfully launched indigenous vaccines, which not only provided protection and treatment to our own countrymen. We administered 225 crore doses, but we also arranged to make these facilities available to the world at large by providing vaccines to 85 other countries and helping them to move out of the crisis. The banking sector led by RBI remained on the forefront during the crisis The first step that was taken to ease the pain of the commercial sector and the smallscale business class was by introducing moratorium schemes followed by introduction of emergency credit line scheme and such other schemes which ensured that economy remained strong and resilient The banking sector also ensured the economic machinery was sufficiently oiled by keeping the branches on and working even during the peak of pandemic, when the entire country was under lockdown

The

pandemic had one positive effect It

changed the way people look at and manage money. Everyone went digital for even a meagre purchase and turned on the UPS scanner on their mobile phones This obviously has changed banking. Many of the footfalls in the branches have reduced, but it has led to higher transactions of varying ticket values With the launch of digital rupee in future, we may see no need for paper currency. As we move from the phase of conservative banking methods to the digital world or the digital journey, with banks offering multi-channel services, the new age banking customer does not desire to make physical visits to the branch anymore However, we have a set of people who still require physical services. Each one of these developments presents unique opportunities, challenges and competition to the existing and new players.

Banks must have the ability to withstand unknown unknowns in this disruptive age. Banks have joined hands with various NBFCs and startups, which not only provide credit of various ticket size values through the use of technology, but also arranged credit for the untapped small scale and MSME sector, who have been the lifeline in many rural and suburban areas.

Banking tomorrow

RBI Governor Dr Shaktikanta Das in his speech on ‘Banking: Beyond and Tomorrow,’ stressed the need for adoption of emerging technologies, customization of products and services, enhanced business and process automation. He also pitched for development of suitable business models with strong governance frameworks, better information management, changes in the mode of working, building enhanced resilience capabilities, and a more responsible societal and environmental role of the banks.

It is imperative that the banking sector must buckle up and partner with the nation on a growth path, as our nation envisions to double its growth in the next decade The Indian manufacturing sector is expected to contribute an increased GDP of 25% by 2025. The key areas that we can count are infrastructure, space, defence and startups With the improvement in our medical infrastructure and better postnatal care, we expect an increase in the average life expectancy of our citizens and reduced infant mortality, thus leading to higher contribution to our workforce and in turn, increased customer base.

Growth prospects in Tamil Nadu

If you look at Tamil Nadu itself, it is the fourth largest state in India and one of the welldeveloped in terms of industrial development and knowledge-based industries like IT It has the third largest number of MSMEs in the country and provides a strong and reliable vendor base to large industries in the state The state also enjoys logistical advantages due to the presence of three major seaports, airports, quality of human resources, a peaceful industrial climate and a positive work culture Tamil Nadu is the only state in India to have all its major districts covered under the industrial corridor project. Industries such as aerospace, defence, electric vehicles manufacturing, textiles, and non-leather footwear are earmarked to be the thrust areas for growth. These are great avenues of opportunities for the finance sector, both at corporate and retail level. Like God, now Wi Fi is available everywhere. The correct password to reach God is faith Likewise, opportunities for the banking are also immense, but we need the correct password which is the ‘customer connect.’

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Mr. D Lakshminarayanan MD, Sundaram Home Finance

The banking sector is at a turning point Twenty-five years ago, how did our banking sector look like?

Computerization was still being debated. Private sector banks were on their way Public sector banks were fighting with their legacies. It's quite remarkable to see how Indian banking system has weathered all the challenges and still remain resilient Twenty-five years from now, banking will dramatically be very different from where it is today.

The biggest threat for banking, as in any other industry, is the emerging global trend Banking is facing a future marked by fundamental restructuring. But we can also assume that the banks will navigate this and become better and more profitable and will grow faster. In the next era, banks can realign to compete in new arenas, organized around customer needs These arenas will expand far beyond the current definition of financial services. And they will also be hotly contested by a wide range of tech giants, technology startups and other non-banks The banks that successfully manage the transition will use technology and data quite successfully to embed themselves deeper into customers’ lives with real time services that were unimaginable just a few years ago. The opportunity is great for those who move fast into this new future.

Banking is also losing its traditional advantages Until recently, big banks grew

Most banks will need to embrace technology, cross industrial platforms and manage to coexist with technology. These platforms dismantle the barrier between traditional industries, reshaping the customer behaviour to fulfil their needs.

~ Mr D Lakshminarayanan, MD, Sundaram Home Finance

profits and growth by applying synergies, economies of scale and accessing large pools of capital. While traditional banks have been convenient one stop shops for businesses and consumers, many haven't evolved their products in a way that matches the tech driven pace of change in the other industries. Products such as the savings account loans and the investment advisory platforms look undifferentiated today and people increasingly feel frustrated by the financial fragmentation that banks have imposed on many consumer processes Banks need to identify and engage these customers as the new competitors are doing to compete. Most banks will need to embrace technology, cross industrial platforms and manage to coexist with technology. These platforms dismantle the barrier between traditional industries, reshaping the customer behaviour to fulfil their needs

Platformization, the new mantra

Platformization is now becoming the new trend Banks now compete with organizations that have the capacity and desire to offer any kind of financial services Global tech giants have used their platforms to offer banking; and they offer it seamlessly to millions of customers. They have eliminated size as a big advantage to the banks’ winning customer loyalty, aggregating and analyzing data and building networks. One recent paradox that we noticed is that a lot of these emerging FinTech startups want to be like banks and get into lending operation. And banks want to be like tech companies introducing new technologies and new platforms So what will the next phase of banking look like? The successful bank of the future will be defined as a network of various platforms. A few banks will dominate the spectrum of banking, but many will participate in that network The transformation is not easy

It will take time but the leaders who move in fast will stay ahead of the curve.

Indian banks must move away from the existing systems for a more modular infrastructure. They must upskill employees to spur the development of new digital solutions and services; or a more robust cybersecurity layer to safeguard their customers from data threats.

As banks gear up with an objective of meeting these goals, the adoption of a modern banking platform is very crucial This will allow the banks to personalize solutions and customer experience.

Three things banks must do

Three things that we see banks adopting in the next few years are:

Blockchain technology: Credit rating, investment banking, loan recoveries and every other activity that bankers are doing would be driven by blockchain, cloud computing and analytics, with less human intervention to achieve better accuracy This will also, to some extent, protect the bankers from cyber related attacks.

Secondly, there will be fewer brick and mortar banks, going by the trend of the apps and super apps that are being talked about.

Digital currency will completely replace the physical currency in the years to come, which in turn would improve compliance and help the government in wider tax collections and better tracking of cash flows. The banks should now be prepared to face the major impact of their operations due to technology and government policies more than ever before.

The winning banks will find a way to create a customer experience, rather than selling mere products and services

Mr. S Krishnan, MD & CEO

Tamilnad Mercan le Bank

Indian Banks started in a very small scale but today they have grown in size and are giving a big challenge to the global banks

It is not only the core banking but also the interoperability that has made a big difference to banking Interoperability helps a customer to use his debit card of any bank in any ATM of any bank. When the bank started growing, naturally, the regulations also need to be enhanced The Indian regulator is one of the well-respected regulators across the world.

Today, the world is envying India on the digital front, particularly in the banking industry The number of transactions that take place in the UPI seamlessly is amazing. We are working on introduction of digital currency in India while various countries including the developed countries are yet to come out with it. We are already able to do this in a closed loop. The banks are keeping pace and running in the race Banks are the backbone of the economy When the country grows, the banks in the country should be able to match the growth. There may be a large requirement of funding Hence, there will be a requirement of big banks and big players who will be able to reach the global market. When they are able to reach the global market, they will be able to get cheaper funds and in turn can lend at a cheaper rate. The question is: Do we need only big banks? The answer is No We need smaller and midsize banks also, who will be able to reach the last mile and understand the local requirements and strengthen the MSMEs. As Indians have got great strength in digital, there is going to be an excellent growth opportunity for every industry, more particularly for the banking, which will be mostly on the digital front.

Mr. R Radhakrishna Chief General Manager, SBI

With the introduction of 5G, the way the medical field is going to improve will be tremendous. Such changes are going to happen in all technological fields, which in turn will help the economy to develop. Wealth generation is going to be much faster. With all these things, the way the banking is going to develop will see a lot of changes Traditional bankers have started to lose their mettle from time to time. This started off somewhere in the 1980s and became more pronounced in the 1990s, when for the first time, the word disintermediation got established. The role of the bank got reduced because the depositor could have access to the borrower He could invest in companies through stock market or other instruments that had come into play during that time. So, that is how the disintermediation started

As we now delve deeper into this, this disintermediation has become much deeper. Every non-banker has also become a banker. Google is not a banker; it is a technical platform but it has become one banker All technical platforms and apps become a bank by themselves. Today, the government itself has become a bank They don't need a bank in the real sense There are going to be a lot of challenges. That doesn't mean that the banks will be out of business. The opportunities for them will tremendously multiply but in a different form. They need to be as competitive as the online platforms that are available, which are helping this disintermediation With more and more technology coming in, the requirement of energy will be tremendous and the global economy has to find better ways of producing energy Therefore, the amount of investments that will be required for creating these infrastructures will be tremendous. So, the opportunities will be there aplenty, but the challenges also will be there

The biggest bane of Indian agriculture has been the fact that the farmers have not been given the due price for their produce, the basic reason being his inability to hold on to his goods which he has produced because of the monetary obligations he has - already he's in clutches of debt Therefore, he has to dispose them as distress sale process If that basic thing is going to change, the way the value chains will develop for him are tremendous. He will get a better price for what he's producing and you can just imagine the money power he will get. This will have a multiplier effect and the economy is bound to grow

Of course, the MSME sector will continue to be the driver of the economy to a larger extent than what it is at present. We are almost seeing the last days of the public sector organizations Slowly, they are being disinvested and we are seeing more of and more of private entrepreneurial power coming into play in most of the sectors which were originally reserved for the public sector So, with this, the economics of the whole process will improve and there is going to be more efficiency. There are going to be some pitfalls from time to time But such a pitfall that can happen in such a growing scenario will not be anything serious, unless it has to do with the food shortages This is how, broadly, the banking system and the economy will develop.

Development of the economy cannot happen at cost of environmental degradation. That is why we are hearing a lot about sustainability nowadays. Going forward, I am of the opinion that GDPs will not be calculated as we do it classically today, but the environmental cost will be calculated and detected. The outlook is very bright because of the opportunities we have and the advantage on the demographic front This is going to result in exponential growth trajectory for the economy. Banks basically are the proxies for the economy, let it be any bank. So they also will have the same trajectory as the economy Of course, they have their own issues to tackle which will be different from bank to bank. But what we have seen in the last four or five years is the fact that the banks have developed more robust systems as regards the credit assessment. There has been a lot of course correction, basically aimed at improving the way the creditor is assessed 

Babu: All of us have boundless number of ideas

But one of the things that we lack is the discipline of execution. If we are able to marry great ideas with great execution, that is what great corporate or organizational success is all about The book ‘Measure What Matters’ written by John Doerr talks about the concept called OKR which stands for Objectives and Key Results.

John Doerr is among the top 100 richest people in the United States He is in the Fortune 100 list of rich people. He is also the partner of a leading firm called Kleiner Perkins, which is one of the early and very hallowed venture capital companies that is 50 years old. They have funded companies like Google, Compaq and Symantec. If you take 100 of the leading IT businesses in the US, at least 25 of them have grown using funds of Kleiner Perkins John Doerr has been out there with Kleiner Perkins, identifying small corporate ideas and used his expertise in helping them grow and become large corporates He's today about 71 and stays in California He talks about the magic of execution Recently, he and his wife have donated about a billion dollars to Stanford and established a school within Stanford that focuses on the concept of how metrics can be used to grow organizations.

Under the “Read & Grow” series, MMA held a panel discussion on the theme of the book “Measure What Matters” authored by John Doerr Mr Babu Krishna Moorthy, Chief Sherpa, Finsherpa Investment Pvt Ltd led the conversation with Mr Ramaswamy Perumal ﴾Ram﴿, Founder & CEO, H‐ Grab Informatix Pvt Ltd , and Mr Aroon Kumar R R, Chairman & Principal CFO, Touchstone CFO Services.

Marry Ideas with Execution

People like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are all students of John Doerr. The fact that they have used this metric and grown proves that this works Incidentally, John himself was schooled in Intel, a chip making company. Right from the 70s, Intel has had an incredible growth. People like Gordon Moore and Andy Grove of Intel have played a huge part in the growth of the IT hardware industry. That's where John Doerr first encountered the idea and concept. He has taken it and used it I believe that the secret sauce to a successful organization is not the brilliant idea It's that brilliant idea married with great execution.

As companies grow large, it becomes very difficult to have shared ideas and shared vision By OKR (Objectives and key results), an organisation must arrive at its objectives and it has to be in the form of a number. For example, how many customers I want at the end of a quarter or a year. Or it can talk about revenue but there's to be a conscious number or an objective metric around it. The key result, on the other hand, is about the things that the organisation is going to do, to achieve that number and there has to be a metric around it For instance, if an organization tries to have a B2C business and it wants to have 100,000 customers at the end of a particular year, then the key result areas could be: How many enquiries I am going to generate digitally One way to look at it is that if I want 100,000 customers, then maybe I must generate 1 million digital leads, so that it gets converted to 100,000 customers Everybody knows very clearly what they need to do, if they have to make the company grow to the next level. So that's a very broad level of this concept of objectives and key result areas Many corporates swear by this concept and agree that it has helped organize themselves better and reach goals in a much better way.

Ram: OKR is not necessarily for the IT companies, like Google or Intel. It has spread across various sectors. I read there's a pizza making company called Zume Pizza which implemented OKRs and succeeded Management by objectives is more in terms of setting the objectives top down. It cascades down to the team. Whereas when you come to OKRs, it is going to be across the organization Here, the teams start creating the objectives and they will be interacting with other teams in doing this There's going to be an intrinsic way of setting the objectives

You can have two types of goals: aggressive goals and committed goals. You can aspire to get to aggressive goals and if you reach 70% of that, it is good Committed goals are the goals that you need to complete in the normal course of the business and that needs to be completed 100%. The goals are going to be set by the teams and then shared between the teams Google follows these two types of goals.

The second is, in setting a goal, you need to know how it is going to be reached. And that is called the key results which will be measured numerically The key results must be time based. Tracking the overall performance is not done once in a year. This is going to be ideally done once in a quarter Companies like Google follow a monthly review The Bill Gates Foundation has implemented OKRs for their Foundation and they have seen success. Companies like the Khan Academy, which is into education and Coursera have also implemented OKRs and tasted success

Aroon: In our college days, we studied Henry Fayol’s theory of management for our line assemblies and the progress we made with this Then the father of management Peter F Drucker came out with MBO Management by Objectives, which was successfully implemented for a couple of decades. At Intel, Andy Grove was very impressed with Peter Drucker's MBO but he felt that it was not so effective for his company's growth. He then modified it and called it as IMBO that is, Intel MBO It was a tool of thought

In OKR, we talk about Objectives and Key Results

The objective can be achieving a market share of 10% or a simple one like delighting the customer. It can be a big and audacious goal The goal is primarily derived from the mission statement The methodologies and the metrics are important in going towards the objective.

How Google Adopted OKRs

Normally, in our work life, we see that most of the objectives and mission statements come top down. There is hardly a semblance of understanding at the lowest level When John Doerr presented his idea to Larry and Sergey of Google in 1999 and asked them about their goal, Larry said that they were looking at 10 Bn$ revenues. Google at that time was not the first search engine Already, six or seven search engines were in place.

Then they looked at achieving that objective within a timescale and worked on the key result areas. They broke it down to products in design, products in production, ways to reach the market and so on Each vertical or functional head was assigned their key results. The person who was going to execute was taken into confidence The metrics to achieve the objective were determined.

The organizational structure was flattened in the process. So instead of having seven layers, you may end up with just three layers The impact can be profound when you have multi-geography firms operating on a time zone difference OKR enables participation by all the team members or contributors who adopt a business partnering approach in setting the objectives and key results. The reporting structure was made broader and concise and they brought in agility

When Intel was established, they used the concept of agility to challenge Motorola, their main competitor at that time. We are familiar with budget setting process Normally we start working on budget in January, interact with other departments, collect data and produce something and then build it up for the management and thereafter for adoption by the Board. This is not going to work in a company which looks at very rapid growth plans So, they changed the review period to quarterly at the most and to make it successful, the objectives could be amended on the fly and the means to achieve certain goals can also be changed. Google went a step further and adopted reviews on a monthly basis, so course correction becomes easier The second significant element is that it was more participatory Buy-in from the executing person was really deep. There was alignment vertically as well as horizontally with other departments and diagonally too What they did is to make the management responsible and the goals were made public. As a result, the goal of a Vice President was known to the factory supervisor.

Babu: Many times when we set goals, we're always looking at it incrementally If I did a sales of 100 last year, my sales number this year is going to be 120. This book talks about setting challenging goals. It means that if last year sales was 100, the next year goal can be 500 or 1000. We wonder if we are dreaming. They call it a moon-shot, which was first used when JFK announced that America was going to make a trip to the moon by sending human beings in a rocket At that time, it was so ridiculous an idea that people laughed at it One of the ways corporates can grow and achieve extraordinary growth is to have two types of objectives. One is quite an extraordinary one, which is not in the normal realm of thinking The author goes on to say that it doesn't matter if you don't hit it. It's perfectly okay if you don't achieve 100% of your audacious goal. Even if you don't achieve it, you will fall somewhere significantly higher than where your competition is That's one big takeaway. The second is to make sure that you achieve 100% of your normal goals. Just because you're thinking about an audacious goal, it does not mean you can give up on doing your day to day stuff. Also, the simplicity of the way in which OKRs get implemented is very interesting.

Review through colour coding

In the typical review mechanism of OKRs, the various key result areas are codified in colour forms. Many times, we are overwhelmed with numbers Colour coding is similar to our traffic signals. If a goal has been reached to the extent of 70 to 100%, it's marked in green If it is between 50 and 70, it's marked in yellow, which tells you that you need to do better and review your process. You have a chance of hitting the goal but you got to change some of the things. The third is in red If you are achieving less than 40%, then it’s really a red alarm There's something wrong either with the way you're approaching it either in the process, the idea or the measurement. So go back and revisit. It is easy to look at a colour code rather than trying to figure out numbers.

Ram: John Doerr introduced another concept called CFR, which is like a twin sister of OKR. CFR stands for Conversation, Feedback and Recognition There has to be a conversation between the manager and the contributor. The contributor can give feedback to the manager and vice versa There has to be recognition for the contributor Like OKRs, CFR is also going to be a continuous process, which means you don't have to wait till the end of the year for annual performance review I worked in large companies and my HR would tell me that I need to have a bell curve in ranking the performance of my team members and make sure that I don't have a right tailed curve or a left tailed curve. John Doerr goes against it He talks about helping the contributor and the team to improve and go forward. In fact, OKR is not tied to compensation and rewards. Google says that when it comes to the compensation and rewards, the OKR is not even brought in This is a very key takeaway. I started my company five years back and we are a small team of around 40 people. Tomorrow, we have our Annual Day for the company and my objective is to implement OKR We are going to write down the key results for that. Along with OKR, I am also planning to implement CFR.

OKR can also be applied on a personal front Changing your job within 1 year or buying a house within 6 months can be an Objective. You can write down the Key Results for this objective. The key results can be the amount of savings you need to have in your bank account Though we have been doing this subconsciously, it is better to put it down into a document.

Aroon: There is no additional cost in implementing OKRs It only requires a change of our thought process Startups, SMEs and mid-sized MSMEs can make use of this tool in their day to day management as well as to achieve key objectives For a small scale entity, 100% growth in three years can be a key objective. Capital for expansion is scarce and we are dependent on others including financing institution The key results can be improving the credit score, so project funding happens

The next steps down the line are the sales target, production to match that, the kind of margins you can afford to get in sales and the terms and conditions for your procurement of raw materials. You need to break down, even in a smaller organization

Measuring what matters is very important Wrong goal setting will lead to disasters. A prime example which is quoted is Wells Fargo, which was incentivizing managers to open up new accounts They went ahead and used their relatives to open multiple accounts and later 5000 people had to be sacked. Here the management set a wrong objective So, the objective setting must be very clear Review once in quarter Cross functional alignment is a key element or characteristic of OKR, apart from vertical and horizontal alignment The next step is bringing in accountability

Separate Compensation from OKRs

When compensation is divorced from the objectives, the stress for the employees is removed In a bell-curve assessment, even if two employees perform very well, only one will be rated in the top and it leads to disgruntlement and demotivation Continuous Performance Review and 360 degree performance review can help to do away with the bell curve assessment. Also, when annual performance review happens, recency bias sets in and people remember only the recent achievements or failures In fact, having quarterly or monthly performance reviews helps in better employee motivation and fitment and eliminates recency bias in evaluating the performance

The next interesting aspect of OKR is the stretch goals. When we exercise and stretch our muscles, we don’t get killed. When we stretch, our muscles get strengthened and toning happens automatically Dhirubhai Ambani was a prime example of setting stretch goals. In 1998, when a major cyclone hit the Jamnagar Refinery project and it was about to be derailed, Dhirubhai stepped in and said, “Nothing is impossible.” Within 15 days, the project was restarted and the plant was commissioned in less than 36 will not succeed for everybody, which is why you have only one Google What barriers do you see in implementing the OKR in an organisation?

Ram: It is the visibility of the goals. You must have visibility of top level goals and the goals being set by the individual teams that must be aligned to the top level goals. There should be some platform to implement it and an application of this goal to ensure connectedness and visibility The peers would be able to see their related teams’ goals and objectives

Aroon: The cultural issue will be a barrier. It's a question of belief. If you're going to bring in and institutionalize OKRs, you need to check out who is going to travel with you in the bus and if they are willing to take it. The top management need to take a call as to the continuance or otherwise of those who are going to do this Without this, there will be chaos and a stressed environment Next would be the infrastructure and system requirements to enable this.

Babu: One of the secret sauces of using this tool is the visibility Everybody gets to see what the others do Sometimes it can be very unnerving for senior leaders months. Honestly, I believe OKR can be used in various scenarios like project execution, cash burn, working capital management and even profit orientation

Suppose the MD is in the Red and a junior executive is in the Green, can the MD face up to it?

Babu: The author is very candid in saying that OKRs

It is also the culture that matters There will always be people who will be negative to any new ideas New initiatives of this nature often fail in organizations, because the top leadership is not on board. If the MD thinks that he has given the tool to the employees and it is up to the organization to implement it and if he goes about his task in his own way, then it is never going to work The leader must be the person who drives this initiative The organization will behave exactly as the leader does. 

Ganesh Natarajan: FRICE is a fairly unusual concept. Can we make everything free for everyone? The question people ask is, “How is it possible?” Today we have a problem It is artificial intelligence It is going to lead to a major job loss event.

When we look at artificial intelligence, what we require is computing capacity In 2017, the best computer that we had, was as good as the rat's brain The human brain is about 100,000 times better than a rat's brain. Applying Moore's Law, our computers get better, faster and twice the capacity every two years By 2050, we will have a computer as good as a human brain. By 2083, we will have a supercomputer that's 100,000 times better than a human brain We look at a rat as a pest We kill them terming it pest control

A computer needs energy. By 2083, 10 billion people are going to be hanging around consuming energy If I am that supercomputer, I'm going to look at all the people as an unwanted load on the system, just like we look at rats now Noah Harare, the author of the book, ‘Sapiens-A Brief History of Humankind’ said that human beings will become useless. People like Bill Gates and Elon Musk say, “Yes, we have a problem on our hands ” The UBI--universal basic income has been floated around for a while. For various reasons, this may not be the best solution.

MMA organised a Discussion on the theme of the book "Free Ice Cream" authored by Mr Ganesh Natarajan Mr R A Nadesan, fulltime director, SRM Group; CA V Pattabhi Ram, author, public speaker and teacher; Ms Malini Saravanan, Head HR ﴾III SBG﴿ Water & Effluent Treatment IC L&T Ltd and Mr Anand Srinivasan, economist, author and value investor, shared their insights in a conversation with the author.

Machine vs. Machine

Computers have already beaten human beings in Jeopardy, Chess and in GO. GO is a game like checkers. There's something called the Shannon number, which is the number of possible permutations and combinations. In a game of chess, it's 35 to the power of 80 So no wonder, chess is pretty hard In GO, it is 250 to the power of 150 Google, through one of its subsidiaries, built the computer called AlphaGo. They taught the rules, gave it a lot of data input and prepared the computer It beat Lee Sedol, the champion in GO, which was a major event in that space What was interesting was that Google set up the next machine AlphaGo Zero. This machine was given the rules and inputs It started learning and beat the previous machine AlphaGo in three days. The next version Alpha Zero beat the previous version, by learning in just 36 hours So now we are talking about the game between computers and the human is out This is scary stuff. What is AI yesterday becomes a part of normal today.

The automation spree

Yesterday, we built a factory and we needed 500 people. Today you build the same factory and you need only 100 people because the cost of sensors has come down Why would I need a person watching the temperature or pressure, when I can put a sensor and walk away? Tomorrow, it's going to be 20 people and the day after tomorrow, there are going to be no people It's a logical progression You can't fight this, you can't argue with this, this is what's happening. 80% of the jobs can and will be automated. And we are not talking about factory jobs but of doctors, lawyers and accountants. In 2050, we are expecting 10 billion people as the world population If 80% of the jobs will go away, how many billion people will be out of work? It's not as if the doctor is bad. The doctor knows all the stuff. But the doctor takes an hour to think through the process He can only think of 20 case studies, the lawyer can only look at 50 or 100 cases but the computer can look at million cases instantaneously.

 Machines will not have fatigue and will work round the clock. People in the new age must have multi‐dimensional and multi‐functional knowledge, to stay competitive.

~ Ms. Malini Saravanan

The other side of the problem is that for most of us, we take up a job to get some income for our survival They need to put food on the table If all of us are going to be without a job, what do we need to do? The simple answer would be to decouple job and our survival There are a couple of ways for this One, make everything free for everyone. The other option is a UBI. But UBI has got many issues. Simply speaking, it is going to increase inequality severely You will have 10 multi billionaires globally and 10 billion paupers Those 10 people will decide what is good for the universe.

Ideas will matter

Millions of years ago, we were in the huntergatherer phase. If you had a spear, you could go and kill some animals and you got your food. Then we started farming If you had the land, you could grow some crops Then we had the industrial phase Warren Buffett is the richest person in the industrial phase. He doesn't want farmland, he wants stocks. The nature of ownership changes as we go forward In the post AI society, it will be ideas, because there'll be a machine to implement the idea. The idea hopefully will come from us.

In resource allocation, agrarian economy was feudalism, industrial economy was capitalism or communism both two sides of the same coin. The only difference is in resource allocation In capitalism, they say it's up to the individual In communism, it's up to the central planning. As we are going into a new era of artificial intelligence, it's time for us to have a new economic model -free ice cream economy

Malini Saravanan: Will AI make us all irrelevant? We don't have to get scared because it is not going to happen tomorrow or next year. It's going to happen only in a phased manner, so we can be much more prepared, we can foresee it and plan for it Despite artificial intelligence coming in, human beings play a significant role, because they are the ones who can be more creative and innovative Tomorrow, we may have robots working along with human beings Machines will not have fatigue and will work round the clock. People in the new age must have multi-dimensional and multifunctional knowledge, to stay competitive

R A Nadesan: AI can probably do fuzzy logic, like in our washing machines, AC and TV. They can do predictions and extrapolations. A combination of fuzzy logic, deep learning, machine learning and sensors and various other things form the robots. Robots can do jobs that human beings cannot do, like working in dangerous terrains- for example, jungles and mines There are also humanoids like Sofia Basically, the understanding is that you need human intelligence to feed artificial intelligence. I do not think that 80% of the people are going to be unemployed If you apply the Pareto principle, 20% of the people who are going to do the job can probably get that 80% result. The other 80% who are otherwise doing repetitive works can do more creative things The routine elements can be done by the robots.

CA V Pattabhi Ram: AI is definitely a challenge. At the same time, we must also recognize that down the years from 70s and 80s, people have been talking about how technology will take over our lives When computerization first came, people said accountants would go away. Accountants did not go anywhere. Only accountants who did not embrace technology disappeared

To give a more current example, a lot of audits that happened today have been done in a better way, thanks to AI. We need to look at AI as a tool that helps us. I do a lot of writing The Grammarly software does a remarkable job in cleaning up the spelling, checking the tense and suggesting modifications. Even in a creative space, AI can do many things We thought that technology will face a challenge in creative areas Today, many new jobs have come up. 15 years ago, we never thought there would be a Swiggy or Uber drivers. So new jobs will come up We need to embrace AI to make our lives far simpler

Mr Anand Srinivasan: There are two distinct sciences in our life. One, we have physical sciences. We also have what is called Social Science like Philosophy and Economics This book on the Frice concept talks about Natural Science. The end point of Natural Science is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states that it is impossible to measure or calculate exactly, both the position and the momentum of an object. That's where social science begins.

We don’t play by rules

AI as of today has limitations. Yes, if the rules are known to you, then you can program a computer to do anything But in most situations in life, you do not know the rules or people don't play by the rules That is 95% of the situation. AI will be effective when people play by the rules.

Let me take an example of a recent cricket test match played between India and Bangladesh in Mirpur,

Bangladesh. I was listening to ‘Ashwin Speak.’ In the subcontinent, you cannot play a spinning ball on the fifth day pitch The skill is to pick which ball will turn and which will go through straight. Most players don't go after the ball that turns and jumps. Most of the wickets go to the balls that go straight Ashwin made an important point as a bowler, which no batsman could do. The balls used in the test match were not the original kookaburra balls So he believed that after 35 overs, the ball would do nothing He tried telling it to others in the team management but nobody took him seriously. If you have just gone by AI, Bangladesh should have won the match, with the quality of bowlers they had But Ashwin knew that the ball would do nothing after 35 overs and that he could play it either on front foot or back foot. The fact was that India won and Ashwin played a key role in it AI can help in a T20 Test match but life is not T20. It is all about playing Test cricket. We have to play for 80 years.

But I agree that 70% of us or even higher are in trouble because our attention span has come down We cannot watch anything for more than five minutes anymore, especially the younger ones. If you lose attention span, you lose the ability to gain knowledge. If you don't study for knowledge and just study to pass the exams, then AI will surely kill you. But if you are going to accumulate knowledge by reading at least 50 pages a day, you have nothing to worry about AI

Malini Saravanan: AI can provide meaningful data analysis and predictive analysis. But human beings are required to look at those predictive analysis. We need humans to understand human emotions and human behavior and in a given business scenario, to provide right decision making.

Ganesh Natarajan: If all people are not going to lose jobs and if they're going get new jobs, that's great But as a species, if this is going to lead to our extinction, then we need to be prepared. So as a minimum, we need to have a plan B. Now, let's move on some basics.

Why do things cost money?

If I am going to start a bakery to make bread, I need flour, a baker and an oven. I need energy gas or electricity So I need to pay for the raw materials, labour, machinery and energy. These are my input costs. As a business owner, I want to make a profit. If my bread costs me Rs 40, I will sell it for Rs 50 If I am a not-for-profit organization, I can sell the bread for 40 rupees.

If I focus on reducing my cost further, then I can make it cheaper When I totally eliminate the cost and do not have a profit, I can sell the bread for free How do we make it happen? Let's look at the energy cost. If we have a solar panel or a wind farm which is fully automated and has zero maintenance, then the cost of energy is zero There is, of course, the capital cost which is the cost of the machinery.

Automation will happen and there is no turning back Newer factories will have less and less labour and they will progressively be totally automated and it will be a major job loss event. The next cost aspect is the raw material. Now this gets interesting. If you want to make a shirt, cloth is the raw material If you want to make cloth, cotton is the raw material A hammer requires steel, which comes from the iron ore. All of these are classified as primary raw materials. They either come from a farm or a mine If you start at the primary raw material and make that free and progressively move up the chain with free energy and total automation all along the process, most costs are eliminated The last one which is the machinery is the most interesting case.

How are the machines made? To make a fridge, you need steel, some moulded plastic, polyurethane foam for insulation and a compressor which is mostly steel, copper and various other metals We need machines to make machines. Think of a 3D printer. Let us borrow a 3D printer, give it the necessary raw materials and make another 3D printer out of it You can return the first 3D printer. So you borrowed the first one, replicated it and gave the first machine back.

Let's get more granular. To make ice cream, I require a factory, milk, cream and sugar as raw materials. I need a dairy processing facility to make cream and sugar mill for sugar. As we go up, sugar cane is required as raw material To make sugar cane, we need energy, water, fertilizer and equipment We need factories to make all of those things. What is interesting is that once you have the infrastructure to grow sugar cane, you also have the infrastructure to grow rice, wheat, grass for cows or any farm material produce So when you solve one problem, you solve multiple problems.

Free energy, free machines and free factories

Just like the 3D printer making multiple 3D printers, let us assume that we make one factory out of another factory and return the first factory The remaining factory is our own factory We start making solar panels or wind farms and start generating electricity. We start using that electricity in our own factory and use the excess energy to repay our debts. The electricity becomes free for us The next step is we start making mining machines that are fully automated and use our own energy to operate. So we got free energy and we got a free mining machine, which is fully automated We eliminated the energy costs, labour costs and the machine cost, at this point, for mining operation.

We're going to do the same thing for a smelter. A smelter is a place where the ore gets melted and we extract the metal We have our own metal We start using our own metal for any further development and any excess metal that we produce, we use to repay our debt Extrapolating this concept, we have our own oil rigs, petrochemical complexes, which will take petroleum and convert it into plastic beads. It's all free. Going forward, this factory can produce whatever we want for free So what do we do? We build a pumping station. Maybe we build a desalination plant to get the necessary water for the sugarcane farm. We build a factory to make fertilizers and we use those fertilizers for our sugarcane We make a factory which produces automated farm equipment which is powered by the energy that we produce. And that takes care of all the farming needs In the same process, we take care of the cows as well.

In the next step, we build a sugar mill and dairy processing facility. We have milk, cream, sugar and then the ice cream factory We got free ice cream for all You take the same process and apply it for any material things you want to be made. We have addressed the two core sources One is the farm and the other is the mine We started from there and automated that part of the process Progressively we moved into the economy Whatever you want, yes, it can be made absolutely free.

 The last thing we want to do is have the whole population sitting in front of TV and not being productive. We will just decay. We don't need anything else to die as a species. We need some motivation, so we need to do something.

In the current economic model, if you borrow something from the bank, you got to return it If I go and borrow your machine, I got to return it Strictly speaking, you don't have to return it, if everything is free for everyone. How it will all work is the price contract Whatever you're getting for free, pro rata, you need to give out for free

Lifelong learning

The final point in the supply chain is the end user You get everything for free, only if you continue to engage in education, social, community or volunteering activities. It's a social contract. The last thing we want to do is have the whole population sitting in front of TV and not being productive. We will just decay. We don't need anything else to die as a species. We need some motivation, so we need to do something

My pet aspect out of all these is education Why should we stop education when we are 20 or 21? We did that because of the Industrial Revolution. We studied for a while and then we were thrown inside the factory We needed people In this new free price economy, you can go back to college and do one subject every semester till you're 80. Innovation requires three things One plus one makes three That's innovation If you know something about biology and something of physics, then you can make up a third subject, which could be biophysics You need to know about multiple things and bring them together to bring new solutions and new ideas. That's not going to happen if you don't educate yourself. Human needs are never ending. We will always be creative, wanting new and different things. 50 years back, nobody thought of an iPhone. Today, none can live without a smartphone.

CA V Pattabhi Ram: First of all, I don't buy the idea that everything is going to be free It will not happen There'll be serious problems about motivation. If everybody is going to have everything, we have the antithesis of market economy We have to be careful about that Also, if you offer something for free, its value comes down.

R A Nadesan: According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if your basic needs are met, then there'll be a lot of other benefits to the society For example, there won't be theft. People might shift their concentration to more creative things. But such a society is not possible and everything cannot be made free If you give me free ice cream, I won't take it I'll be suspicious of that.

Anand Srinivasan: A society without motivation will not survive Parsis are the first community that is going to vanish They are less than one lakh persons today They are one of the most successful and richest communities in the world. They have more than a lakh of flats empty in Bombay, which can be occupied only by Parsis for free There are no takers, simply because there are not so many Parsis anymore. The next big society that is going to vanish is Japan. It's a very sad thing The collapse of Japan is an economic collapse and a social collapse, in spite of it being a society where most of things have come free. Japan is past the stage of being able to revive itself only because, from their great 1989 crisis onwards, the real wages in Japan have been continuously going down. Even today, there is not enough inflation in Japan. They printed and gave money free Japan has had negative interest rates for 40 years now -from 1980 to 2020

There are two major flaws, according to me in this argument of free economy. One is deeply philosophical and which is a root of Eastern philosophy It is the difference between Buddha and Shankara, two ancient philosophers. The philosophy of Buddha is you can eliminate desire. Ashoka embraced it and it went to Sri Lanka and everywhere else but it died in India, because Shankara argued 400 to 500 years down the line, that if you eliminate desire, there is no way the human race will survive. That is exactly what happened to the Parsis and to the Japanese The third country where this trend is now very clear, is Germany. It is now clearly accepted that in 10 years, there'll be less Germans than what they were in 1950 So this free argument doesn't cut ice

Money is the labour exchange

The second is a misunderstanding of what money is Money is not something that government creates Government has no money It just prints what you believe is money. Every year, in the budget, the