New Delhi, Mar. 11 (ANI): Union Minister of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Ajay Maken, who delivered a keynote address at the India Conference held at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School campus, wowed the audience by talking about how India and its policymakers took a decade to accept that urbanization is inevitable and how that sentiment has changed drastically today when everybody understands that urbanization is actually desirable.
In his keynote address yesterday, Maken spoke on the "Challenges of Urbanisation" to an eager audience of 400+ students from across Harvard, MIT and other universities, professors, India enthusiasts, businessmen, and local professionals.
The conference, now in its tenth year, is one of the largest student-run India centric conferences in the country. The conference has been tackling the Indian growth story for years, bringing the most relevant debates, opinions, and speculation to Harvard's campus.
This year's theme: "India vs. India-Local Strength or Global Growth?" referred to the decision to embrace India's daunting complexity and seeming incoherence rather than oversimplifying the hackneyed 'growth story'. How does the world's largest slum proliferate in the midst of a shining new hub of international commerce? How does the world's largest secular democracy understand its history of religious violence? It naturally led to diverse and engaging panel discussions on areas such as social enterprise, investing in India, education, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, agribusiness, politics, technology, and healthcare.
The conference had a stellar line-up of keynote speakers. Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovation, spoke about radicalizing democracy through making information more radically available to a new generation of Indians.
Ashok Alexander, formerly country director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, spoke at length about the need to rise above the standard reaction of paralysis in the face of this complexity in public health.
Deputy Ambassador, Arun K. Singh of the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C. mentioned the many colors of India and the difficulty they pose when viewed through the lens of U.S. cooperation.
Other keynote speakers included -Siddharth Roy Kapur, Bollywood film producer and MD-Studios of UTV Disney; and Ashish Singh, the Chairman of Bain and Company, India. (ANI)
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