India 2020 A vision for the new millenium

Can India become a developed country?: What makes a country developed? Wealth of the Nation, prosperity of it's people, standing in international forum.
Ability to sustain the wealth created and creat more.
Nehruvian vision for development, elimination of ignorance, illiteracy, poverty, disease and inequalities in opportunities.
Stretegic Strength: developed countries have set up several non-tariff barriers which strike at the roots of 'ideal' competition based on 'market' forces. These are mostly aimed at denying opportunities to other countries to reach a developed status. Selectively targeted actions by more powerful players when country tries to march ahead to realize its vision of reaching a developed status.
Technology as core streangth of nation: The direct linkages of technology to the nation's strategic strengths are becoming more and more clear, especially since the last decade. India's own strength in a number of core areas still puts it in a position of reasonable strength in geo-political terms. Any nation aspiring to become a developed one needs to have strengths in various strategic technologies and also the ability to continually upgrade them through its own creative strengths. 3 implications, 1) creation of large scale productive employment, 2) ensuring nutritional/health security for people 3) beter living conditions
A vision for the economy: It is imperative that to keep up our growth we manage our exports and imports and ensure our endogenous competitive strengths within the agricultural, industrial and service sectors.
Multilateral regimes to these effects exist in terms of General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and other environment related multilateral treaties. India cannot afford not to sign these treaties, though we could have done our homework a little better during the negotiations.

What other countries envision for themselves?: Europe and USA, Malaysia, China, Israel, Japan, South korea. Japanese, through voluntary action by theri industries and government agencies, invested four times more towards their own technology development for every unit of money they spent in importing technology. China putting spacial emphasis on research and development of high technologies that would find defence applications.

Evolution of technology vision 2020: After independence, many of our vital socio-economic and even military sectors began to have a greater dependence on foreign sources for innovation or technology.
India's need and core competencies: India's needs are very clear: to remove the poverty of our millions as speedily as possible, to provide health for all; to provide good education and skills for all; to provide employment opportunities for all; to be a net exporter; and to be self-relient in national security and build up capabilities to sustain and improve on all these in the future.

Food, Agriculture and Processing: The crisis and food security: Future needs and capabilities: Food demand and the Indian people: Challenges to Indian Agriculture: Each state should concentrate on agricultural products most suited to its agro-climatic conditions, as it cannot hope to be self-sufficient in all the essential commodities.
Environmental problems and international pressures: The general agreement on trade and tariff (GATT) and the obligations to the world trade organisationhave implications for the future course of agricultural research and development and other initiatives we may take. These relate to giving market access to other countries in selling their products in India. This will place a demand on quality and efficiency in our own agricultural operations. Limts will also be placed on how much domestic support can we give to our agriculture.
Technologies: food security vs industrial importance crops. A major industry could grow around agriculture support system (water harvesting, machinery, agro chemicals, fertilizers)
Developed countries monitoring crop yields of other countries to help their own exports
Specific and urgent measures: Our country is and will be major producer and consumer of wheat and rice.
Make central India the production centre of vegetables and fruits and make efforts to make these commodities available at lower price. This will have an effect on the consumption of wheat and rice.
India is one of the few countries where nearly 50 percent of the geographical area is arable, a benefit not available to China or USA.
A strategy is need whereby small farmers don't loose ownership of the land and yet become a part of the larger area of cultivation
post harvest technologies and agro-food processing: Our telecommunication and space technologies are well established. Let these be deployed in major effort.

Materials and the Future: Historically pace and growth of human civillization has been closely linked to the proficiency with which people have been able to use and shape materials.
13 areas for specific attention: steel, titanium, aluminium, rare earths, composites, ceramics, building materials, photonic materials, superconducting materials, polymeric materials, nulear materials, biomaterials.
Titanium: Missed opportunityIndia possesses 37% of world's illmenite ores. bio compatible.
Investments:

Chemical Industries and our biological wealth: roughly in most countries chemical industry sells half its turnover to other manufecturing operations rather than directly to the consumers.
The chemical industry has its most important components in the developed world, with western europe japan and north america accounting for roughly 70% or the world chemicals productio nand consumption.
Indian chemical industry: Co-existence of a number of different feedstocks for manufacture is phenomenon almost unique to India.
Herbal medicines and marine products are likely to emerge as huge areas of income generation and employment.
Between the 16th and 17th century, India witnessed great upheavals in the development of medical botany and some of the omst widely used herbal drugs came to light in this period. For this reason the period is also called the age of Herbal Medicine.

Manufecturing for Future: Modern face of manufacturing: Mass production and production for the masses became the bases of new business strategies. Large-scale consumption by all with the social benefit of removing poverty became the dominant economic strategy.
Nature of the business in manufecturing sector is such that a few companies dominate the world scene due to the superiority of their technological base and organizational strengths.

Service as People's Wealth: Value systems in marketing communication: Is it necessary to pursue this 'one-upmanship', characteristic of consumerism? why not promote those changes related to energy conservation or environmental protection or safety and not encourage trends which are addressed to the mere looks of a product or to some vague concept of user-friendliness?
Advertisement: Most Indian companies spend about 1% or more of their turnover on advertisement, often more than what they spend in r&d. Can we not rid ourselves of the advertisement culture? If the social or commercial purpose of advertisement is only to provide technical and commercial information to the people, why not give this information freely on demand of display it in suitable public places in an inexpensive manner, as the advertisement costs are really finally borne by the consumers.

Strategic Industries: Defence supplies: insufficient attention to absorb, adapt and to upgrade imported knowhow and equipment.
One of the largest programmes of the DRDO is the light combat aircraft. (Now, Tejas). It has got all the potential elements of high technology, 33 R&D establishments, 60 major industries and 11 academic institutions are integrated and working together on this project.
The future: All the critical elements are driven by advances in materials, electronics, advanced sensors, information processing, robotics, and AI.
Advanced sensors

Health care for All:
The Enabling Infrastructure: We observe that persons enjoying a better standard of living are able to work more. A simple truth is that a modern developed economy cannot be built on a large number of people living just above the poverty line, producing agricultural products alone and cut off from the test of the manufacturing and business centres.
Electricity: there has been an overemphasis on generation relative to transmission and distribution.
Village clusters: