Good morning once again and thank you so much for having me here it’s an absolutely wondrous occasion the place the people everything about it is absolutely magical before I begin my pranams and thank you to swamiji to the entire Mission and all the people especially to a captain for inviting me
Here and his entire team and so many other luminaries I’ll run out of time if I mention each one of you but especially Mr Hegde there who’s been an inspiration and like so many others thank you so much for calling me more so because the fact is that I am
Normally called only once to a place if people don’t call me the second time I remember an occasion where a very dear friend um was in rajya Sabha MP no less he invited me for a conference he was organizing on Dynasty or Scourge in Indian politics
And of course uh he being a BJP uh rajya Sabha MP the idea was to completely uh you know knock The Living Daylights out of Congress that is a party of dinos uh and when my turn came I listed out 94 names of BJP MPS and mlas who are also died last so
[Applause] we do remain friends but of course even my my speech the YouTube video also has been removed from their auspices [Laughter] is an absolutely dear friend then I think it was Vicky who invited me um to talk about how corruption has decreased in the last 10 years under the
BJP and I promptly went there and listed out seven or eight huge instances of where corruption has not just increa not just decrease but actually increased so uh that’s the end of weekly inviting me ever again uh then there was an uh on the sidelines of the the forthcoming G20 thing I was
Invited to a place where uh lieutenant governor no less was sitting there and I said for what he had stated that the fellow should be suspended for a month after that I had to run from that City so there’s no chance of my being invited there again but I do hope
Because of my this truvant nature that has endeared to so many I’m very grateful I even if I’m not invited to this place I will come on my own and [Applause] it’s it’s such a such a magical place so thank you so much again um
As for the topic uh that I I thought I would talk on and of course I would want it to be roughly split half and half so that I I love to have at almost like an interactive session there’s so many youngsters out here um and so many learned people so I would
Love to listen to uh any questions and comments that you may have so I think the way I’ve structured it uh uh Captain is that roughly 45 minutes I’ll talk and then the next 45 or even more we will keep it for question and answer session
To give opportunity uh to all of you to ask and for us to interact but as as the the topic goes uh India towards 2047 that would be 100 years of our modern Republic a land of opportunities so before I begin I’d like to have a
Show of hands as to how many of you believe that India is a land of opportunities almost everyone except a few Communists there but that’s okay no just just joking I’m from jnu so I can spot a communist a mile away no and and now now is the real thing
That I I dare say I haven’t even told the captain a Twist in the tail because uh what words a tale if it doesn’t have a twist all of us here you see are of course born and flesh humans but at the end of the day we are just
Cinders fritters we are remnants as I said of an 8 000 year old civilization what we say here what we represent doesn’t matter at all we don’t crave for credit the people who chiseled khajuraho one of our greatest creation we don’t know their names so never talk of credit
So what we say and what we do is not important in the current moment of space and time it has ramifications for our next generation and for their next generation it has ramifications for the next 8 000 years that I firmly believe we should be able to survive sufficiently
So I ask you again hand on heart how many of you believe that India is a land of missed opportunities I am proud of you thank you so much because that’s the truth that’s the truth that we somehow either deliberately or otherwise because we feel squeamish about it fail to acknowledge
The brutal fact that more than India being a land of opportunities India is a land of missed opportunities now I can give you a lecture for the next 45 minutes on India being a land of opportunities but that would be what politicians do and governors do is boring because you’ve heard it from
Almost every mouth who’s entered either a government or an esteemed organization so I want to talk about the others aspect where equal number of hands have been raised which is India is a land of missed opportunities and I just don’t do it because I am compulsive contrarian or I’m a pessimist
I do it for two reasons one is I want to learn from you agreements and disagreements at the end when my lecture finishes as to what do you think of this and second when I say I want to learn I firmly believe that a teacher who stops being a student stops being a
Teacher so for me if I ever to call myself a teacher I want to learn at every moment of my breathing life something new something that isn’t right that can be corrected something that is not to be done for me but something that I owe it to my children and their children
We are keepers of a flame we did not ignite the flame please remember that so the way I have structured this is that I already kind of took it for granted that all of you would agree with me that I talk about India being a land of missed
Opportunities a bit naughty of me there but I think I think all of us would want to listen about that because for me one can Mock and ridicule every ISM except criticism because it is only through learning when somebody has criticized you that you can better yourself and I don’t want
To better myself I want this land to be better for my my children and their children so I have divided this talk roughly of 10 to 15 minutes each on various domains where I believe firmly that we were and are and remain a land of opportunities but we exhibited ourselves in these domains
As a land of missed opportunities hopefully we would correct ourselves and these domains are to begin with signs and then I’ll move on to sustenance and then I’ll talk a little bit about the other aspects that we’ve completely not just missed the opportunity we’ve not even seen the opportunity and
Finally to Industry and businesses so and because when you talk about science you have to be absolutely careful you have to be ruthlessly objective you have to watch every word what you say I have structured what I want to talk about in this domain of Science and I have
Written it and then we will move forward about other domains so let me Begin by elaborating on the missed opportunities in the field of science and by missed opportunities I not only mean by way of business as I said cultural educational or social and I will come to each one of these
Domains shortly also by best opportunities I absolutely certainly do not mean missing an opportunity of exploiting human misery or disease not at all of what I’m going to talk of next by missed opportunity I mean missing the opportunity of saving tens of thousands if not millions of lives I talk here of covid
It is surreal almost dreamlike of how quickly we have reverted to what life was before covet almost as though Kobe did not happen or Kobe did not disrupt damage dismantle destroy our lives and livelihood for three years there is not a single soul here thank God for that who’s wearing a mask
Hand wash masks sanitizers social distancing these words and phrases have now disappeared from our lexicon as quickly as they appeared in 2020 nonetheless it is important in fact it is vital that we revisit the pandemic and learn and take lessons from it if we are to avoid another soon or
Indeed when it arrives deal with it better than we dealt with the covet pandemic last three years let me though Begin by acknowledging something that isn’t acknowledged enough and it is this that the administration of two billion doses of anti-covet vaccines within a year is arguably and I believe definitely independent
India’s greatest achievement and unquestionably Mr modi’s greatest achievement and everyone involved in this incredible Enterprise from the president and the Prime Minister down deserves the highest praise possible it showed the power of science and the power of a nation that believes in the power of science it showed the faith Indians have in
Science and scientists it showed India to be well incredible India that said the task before us as Indians who love our country and want to constantly improve so that we can tackle the next pandemic better is to identify where we fell short where we were found wanting
Where we failed and where we missed an opportunity as I say Mock and ridicule every ISM except criticism and one thing that needs to be criticized but hasn’t been both by those in the ruling dispensation for fear of reprisals and those in the opposition for fear of exposing their ignorance is the boast
That India is the world hub for vaccine research the sarskov II SARS coronavirus 2 genome was made public on the 12th of January 2020. seems all those years ago 24 hours later on 13th of January 2020 the American Pharma company moderna had synthesized their mRNA vaccine against covet
And they had submitted it for clinical trials 24 hours later the virus on the other hand was cultured by 24th January 2020 in Australia and 2nd February 2020 in the USA culturing this virus was important because this would have been the fastest route to the conventional vaccine India on the other hand
Managed to culture the virus two months later on 16th of March 2020 and it was only two months after that on 9th of May 2020 that this train was transferred onto Bharat biotech for the manufacture of co-vaccine once the live culture virus was rendered impotent or a virulent by chemical inactivation
The human trials began in July 2020. so a virus that was cultured in January by Australia was deployed as a vaccine by India only six months later is this what world vaccine hubs do Trail the rest of the World by six months by 7th of February 2020 the Jenner Institute in Oxford had
Already synthesized their anti-covet vaccine and set it up for clinical trials this was the vaccine that was mass produced in India by the serum Institute and named Kobe Shield while Bharat biotech’s co-vaccine was alive attenuated vaccine or inactivated vaccine Kobe Shield utilized a chimpanzee adenovirus based Vector system to deliver the part of
Coronavirus that would then elicit human immune response and protect us when we got infected with the real virus the technology was not new and has been used previously for synthesizing vaccines against other diseases for example the same replication deficient chimpanzee adenovirus was used earlier by the same Oxford scientist for
Smuggling in the MERS Coronavirus Spike protein or for the merge coronavirus vaccine in fact this technology is 20 years old it was first used as a carrier in 2002 for a rabies vaccine India and Indian scientists were very much aware of this technology and had employed it for testing vaccines against malaria and
Even chikungunya but real speed was shown by a country that never gloated as a world vaccine hub soon as the SARS to coronavirus genome sequence was made public as I said on 12th of January 2020 the Oxford scientist went to work and on 17th February 2020 they had
Initiated the safety and other clinical trials of this Kobe Shield vaccine and as early as 23rd April 2020 the phase one trial results were published The Perfect Storm lay in wait for us a year later and we had no inkling of it India had administered approximately 100
Million vaccine doses by April of 2021. just at the onset of the Delta wave only four crore people over the age of 60 had been vaccinated only 1.8 percent of Indian population was fully vaccinated and we are the world Hub of vaccine research we claimed and here is the harsh truth
From January till May of 2021 we had already saved 124 Million Lives through vaccinations we could have saved so many more our speed was not even a million shots per day this despite knowing the spectacular icmr results that out of 110 million Indians initially vaccinated with the first dose
Only 21 300 went on to contract covet a success of 99.99 percent people died during the second wave because they weren’t vaccinated plain and simple one Indian vaccinated meant one oxygen cylinder less one deathless tens of thousands died one feels terrible for what their near and dear ones went
Through are going through now as they see all of us without masks not a single family remained untouched from the covet scourge there is nothing worse than a what if in medicine what if he had got that drug in time what if he had got that vaccine in time if we could have
Vaccinated 25 million Indians on prime minister’s birthday which we did why couldn’t we do 25 million a day back in March or April 2021 especially when the government had claimed there was no vaccine shortage these questions should have been asked by the people in charge because lives were at stake people died
But these questions weren’t asked away from the science and r d of vaccines there was also the situation that during the devastating Delta wave both the center and the states messed up abdicated their responsibilities and left it to the citizens to fend for themselves by all accounts the Indian
Mutant in Maharashtra as well as the UK mutant in Delhi and Punjab had a lot to do with the ferocity of the second wave the so-called Delta wave we had sequenced the Indian mutant back in October 2020 that was the time to carry out contract tracing isolate those who harbored it
And nip it in the bud we failed to do that we ran out of funds to speed up genome sequencing instead we made statements like court kovid has reached its end game unquote with our experts even displaying graphs that predicted covet disappearing all together we stopped adhering to covet Norms we
Arranged massive political rallies religious festivals protests and through all this one may ask that while it is routine for the politicians to abdicate their responsibilities at the altar of electoral expediency or appeasing vote Banks what was our Supreme Court doing the short answer is nothing I already have a contempt case against
Me so it doesn’t really matter if supreme court goes after me again given our inadequate Health infrastructure shouldn’t we have been extra vigilant the signs were all there but we refused to see them most Nations that had suffered the first wave experienced an even bigger second wave America had
Faced a catastrophic oxygen scarcity in California in December and January of 2020 couldn’t our health and science task forces have foreseen a drastic upsurge in oxygen requirement during our second wave after masks and vaccines it was oxygen that was saving lives its need was way more
Urgent than the other two because it was a matter of life and death and seconds counted questions needed to be asked from the center and the states both but no one asked them and no one answered our daily production of medical grade oxygen was 3200 metric tons it was a fact that
Oxygen shortage of the magnitude that was felt during the second wave was not felt during the first wave so the question to be asked was did those in charge think the second wave would not be as big as the first and if they thought this what were their
Reasons for thinking this did they not anticipate that the second wave could be much larger than the first given that this had been the case for Every Other Nation and therefore if would have logically followed that we would have needed much more than just 3200 metric
Tons of medical oxygen to get us through the second wave the center claimed during the Delta wave that our requirement is going to be 7 000 empty per day but again what made them come to this figure did they know for certainty that when the peak was going to be reached
Did they know that the requirement was seven thousand empty for sure what if it was ten thousand empty per day or even fifteen thousand metric tons that was not a single politician or health official who correctly figured out the amount of oxygen we would need in the second wave not one
They were all cutting ribbons of hastily set up oxygen plants the issue was further muddled by the media peddling fake news of us exporting medical oxygen when in fact we had exported industrial oxygen and that to only 0.4 percent of our yearly output of 2.19 million metric tons
But that doesn’t absolve the powers whose responsibility it was to predict the medical auction requirement for the second wave and to keep enough as a buffer on top of this we suffered logistical issues with one state hindering movement of oxygen to another the companies themselves were complaining of the highways being
Blocked by the protesting Farmers but no politician had the guts to remove the illegal protests and blockades it was sheer cruelty to not be able to administer oxygen to the needy patient so much more cruel than not having a vaccine or not wearing a mask because the need was immediate and that need
Decided between life and death who ultimately I ask took responsibility for the misery and deaths faced by the citizens the jury is still out whether this virus was a man-made disaster or not but our suffering in the second wave certainly was we were in a Race Against Time to save
As many lives as possible while our daily vaccination capacity was 6 million doses we almost never touched this figure in all the months preceding the Delta wave managing barely half a million per day or thereabouts the vaccination drive just wasn’t fast enough as Delta wave started in Earnest Delhi
Had more than 1.5 lakh positive cases every week the true figure would have been at least five times that because the more you tested the more you discovered the positives and Delhi was testing around 85 000 to 1 lakh every day six percent of all covet positives required hospitalization
Delhi had only 20 000 covet beds and fifty thousand beds overall so it was impossible to hospitalize every needy patient vaccination was the only solution but here too Delhi had not even vaccinated eight percent of its population even as it entered the devastating Delta wave the simple truth was that the entire vaccination
Discovery trials manufacturing and then Administration was like the Great Indian wedding the groom was late the bride was crying the food wasn’t ready there was a power cut the generator didn’t work the panditji went missing but in the end it all came together well except the fufaji I.E me who is never satisfied
But I hope you will appreciate that we need fufajis we need them to tell us what went wrong and what we missed and what we need to do to become better because the truth is there’s always a pandemic around the corner we cannot avoid it how can we when we haven’t in a
Billion years we have co-evolved with viruses ten percent of our genome is viral DNA the question to be asked is are we prepared for the next viral Perfect Storm that’s the question away from covert let me now focus on another aspect of diseases and their cures
That we as a nation have an unimaginable Advantage but true to our habit it remains untapped but I get ahead ahead of ourselves to predict our future India in 2047 we need to First analyze our past the best way to predict what India would be in 25 years from now
Is to see what we were 25 years ago recently an icmr report brought out two revealing pie charts that dealt with the contribution of major disease groups to total d-a-l-wise in India d-a-l-y is disability adjusted life years how many people are affected by the diseases and how their lives are affected
In 1990 the pie chart and in 2016. the standard metric as I said is Daly is used the world over when categorizing the epidemiological effect of any disease on a given population so in simple words one is looking at the kind of diseases Indians were Afflicted with in 1990 and presently
So in 1990 before liberalization that is 60 percent of the diseases affecting Indians were communicable diseases bacterial diseases like tuberculosis or MRSA or cholera Vector Bond diseases like malaria and Dengue viral diseases like AIDS hepatitis influenza measles and only 30 percent were non-communicable diseases like the cardiovascular or cancer or asthma or diabetes
In the past 30 years growing economic Prosperity burgeoning middle class taking 430 million odd people out of abject poverty has meant that the pie charts have totally flipped now 70 percent of the diseases affecting Indians are now non-communicable diseases 70 percent are we ready for this tsunami that is going to come
Our way when the pie chart flips it tells you two things from communicable to non-communicable it tells you a that yes India is getting prosperous but it also tells you that India awaits a catastrophe it tells you that there is an opportunity but it tells you that we might already
Have missed that opportunity and I say that at the back of a recent landsat paper that has been published through the research carried out by a group in India in icmr and abroad led by Dr uh Dr Mohan principally that says there already are as many as 10 percent of our population
Who are diabetics that’s 140 million people Indians are already diabetics and pre-diabetics it says 15 to 20 percent of our population that’s more than the population of Brazil that many Indians are either diabetic or pre-diabetic what are we doing about it that’s the question going forward because going forward I’m very sure
Given the genetic techniques and I know a lot of them in molecular biology that we would have developed cures for the communicable diseases by 2047. the government says it what it will eradicate tuberculosis by 2025 which is just two years from now and malaria by 2030 will that’s the thing with politicians they
Never meet deadlines but they always set them and the scientists they never set deadlines but they always meet them but be that as it may if not by 2025 tuberculosis certainly would be eradicated by 2047. but that’s not the tsunami that’s coming our way the tsunami of tuberculosis came in the
60s and the 70s and then when HIV came up in the 80s then most people who died of HIV actually died of tuberculosis so the next wave of tuberculosis was in the 90s through drug resistance so tuberculosis is not the impending wave the impending wave is directly because of our prosperity
Do we have a drug is there an indigenous drug that India has developed against diabetic but before I go down that lane I want another show of hands how many of you know who Lakshmi kutte is okay not a single hand has gone up and a year ago I would have joined this
Crowd in not being able to raise my hand Lakshmi kutti is an 85 year old frail lady from the forests of the western guards going down to Kerala who won the padmusri award three years ago it is because most of our adult life she has been collecting and cataloging medicinal plants
That belong to the forest where she lives she has a cornucopia or a library of 500 medicinal plants many of them would result in giving out super drugs that the Pharma companies may get billions of dollars by selling but have we investigated any of those medicinal plants by Lakshmi kutti buy now
We all know and The Honorable Chancellor and vice chancellors and we were talking to I was talking to them he was telling us the incredible biodiversity that India is blessed with we would have already found out cures to not just all the diseases we have but
Even of the diseases that we aren’t even Afflicted with right now we would have cataloged drugs against the diseases that are of the future what to talk of the present forget about one there should have been 500 Lakshmi kutti natural products institutes by now and each one of them given just one job
Take a plant find out what is the active molecule in it that Lakshmi kutti says is going to cure this disease have we done it forget 500 there isn’t even one we used to be World beaters in natural products chemistry in the 1950s but we completely lost that race
In this race for Western aping we forgot what we were good at and I’ll tell you what will happen because I have seen the past and the past is that a Chinese lady a frail Chinese lady just like Lakshmi kutti went to the jungles where she was living
In in the Interiors of China discovered a plant extracted the molecule out of it and that molecule right now is the only certifiable cure for malaria that molecule is artemisin just like land of one of Lakshmi kutti’s medicinal plants that Chinese lady took out this molecule from that plant
But that’s not the end of the story is the only viable cure for malaria because chloroquine there is rampant drug resistance against it this lady got the Nobel Prize for her discovery she published it in a journal that those in the No No e-journal publishes an impact factor
That impact factor of that journal wasn’t even one in context the more popular the journal the more the journal scientific fraternity runs after is those journals with impossibly high impact factor like nature is probably 40 50 cell is 60 science is even 80 Lancet is probably crossed hundred
This Noble Chinese Nobel Laureate who discovered that drug published in a Journal of impact factor of 0.9 think about it for a second she was China’s Lakshmi kutti and we have forgotten our own Lakshmi kutti and I’ll tell you what will happen I have told you the past and I’ll tell you
The future that some European scientists or an American team or an Australian team would seek permission obtain it go into the jungles of Western gods and Kerala talk to Lakshmi kutti get hold of her library of 500 medicinal plants take it to their countries find out which
Active molecule is in each one of those plants generate that active molecule one of them would be a cure for diabetes and they would get The Nobel Prize for it would still remain in those jungles and once that American gets the Nobel Prize we would give Lakshmi kutti a Padma
Bhushan or a Padma vibhushan or if she is lucky is this not a land of missed opportunity I ask you objectively when we have something and we don’t act on it what can be worse than that so on science I leave it there because the other aspects are equally painful but this is
Not a tale of Chinese tortures let me let me go to something that affects not just what we do in the next 20 30 40 years but what we would be in the next 200 300 400 years I talk of the technology that even the Supreme Court has implored our governments cutting
Across party lines over the last 30 years to act but we have failed to act forget about in a huge or a major way even in a limited way I talk of the fact that while in this country huge swathes of lands are affected by famine and drought at the same time
Equally huge swedes of land are wrecked by floods we’ve seen what happened in uttarakhand we’ve seen the drought in chattisgarh we’ve seen sometimes even in the same state because of the largeness of this country we have an area that is wrecked by famine and an area that is wrecked by flood
The most obvious way to remove this problem to solve this was River linking now this is not a figment of somebody’s imagination that you talk of linking River so that excess Waters from one place will go to the place where the waters are deprived this has been deliberated for more than 40 years
There have been at least 12 bona fide expert scientific committees that have worked on this that have submitted their reports to the Supreme Court there are Supreme Court judgments that say implore the government what are you doing why are you worried about the next five years or election cycle
Why aren’t you worrying about 50 years we need River linking 63 percent of our irrigatable water goes into the sea wasted 63 percent of the water that can be used for irrigation is this not a Calamity in 45 years our water availability per capita has more than halved
Where is the water going for in 2047 all of us have felt the positive water but that’s just a fraction of what lies in weight unless we act on it why aren’t we active on it four years ago there was this past region of Maharashtra latu and
Water trains were going there to take water that was not all the tragedy was that politicians were cutting ribbons when the water train would move from one station to the next they were proud of it the politicians were inaugurating those water trains what can be more shameful than that
We are going to face a catastrophe we have been offered solutions for the last 30 years India was a land of opportunity 30 years ago today it is a land of missed opportunity and it will not be even a land of any opportunity if we do not start thinking
About these massive projects now let me swiftly come to the next aspect when I talked about independent India’s greatest achievement which was vaccinating within a span of one year a billion people twice over let me talk about India’s biggest disaster independent India’s biggest disaster and what I find very perplexing is
That no one everyone has seen it and it’s almost as if the news cycle it entered the new cycle independent India’s biggest disastrous decision and it exited and we are just living Our Lives unconcerned I talk here about the repeal of the three Farm reforms I need to give you a background
Before you understand how calamitous the repeal of these three Farm laws have been and why do I say this yes I’ve been accused of hyperbole before and television debates do lend oneself to that but trust me this is not hyperbole these are facts I’m giving India is the world’s second largest
Producer of sugarcane every year we grow 350 billion kilograms of sugarcane sugarcane is one of the most extensive water guzzling crops it requires only seven percent of arable land but 78 percent of irrigation water the amount of sugarcane the amount of water required to grow 350 billion kilograms of sugarcane every
Year that we do is equivalent of one quadrillion liters I have heard I had hurt till billion billion trillion I had not even heard of quadrillion and just to give you an idea of how much this is to make your life easier I have calculated this one quadrillion liters is equivalent of
The water that is present in 10 ganga Sagar dams 10 ganga Sagar dams that is the amount of water that we use every year to irrigate a sugarcane crop and grow sugar cane and sugar prices they have halved in the last six years this is the issue that we face
And an ex-chief Minister a BJP chief minister of Maharashtra did a great thing seven years ago six years ago he said if you vo I can this country can no longer afford to blindly grow sugar cane if you want to grow sugar cane you have to seek permission from the government
So it was not a Draconian thing because it’s a seek our permission and we will give it but it was it was Trend setting because everyone knows what seeking government permission means hate is more than the lifespan of the person who’s actually seeking it so people knew that this was a fantastic
Way to regulate and restrict the growing of this water guzzling crop within a week that decision was rescinded he had to take back that because one other politician I wouldn’t name who’s got India’s second or third highest award required water and sugarcane for the the sugar industry and molasses
Industry and liquor making industry in Maharashtra this is how our politicians think they are thinking day to day week to week month to month they are not thinking forget about year to year they aren’t thinking decade to decade they aren’t thinking centuries to centuries and opportunity can come in a day can be
Realized in a week but a missed opportunity will destroy decades and centuries and what happened one thing led to another when the election cycle is entered the politicians gave out huge newspaper ads congratulating them and their parties for increasing the MSP equivalent that the government gives to sugarcane
The government is buying more and more sugarcane from the farmer because it’s a vote Bank we have the capacity of the FCI godown is about 30 million tons of buffer capacity of Rice right now there is more than 101 million tons of rice that we have 60 million tons over and above what
We actually require as a buffer capacity but which government has the guts to refuse buying rice buying wheat from these farmers this extra 60 billion tons is not to be ever used by the humans it’s being used being made for stored for rats if only rats could vote maybe then the
Policies might change agriculture contributes only 12 and a half to 13 percent to our GDP but it employs 44 percent 44 percent of our 515 million strong Ready Labor Force 44 percent just like 250 300 million odd people in the west it is two percent even in
Economies that are middle income or fast approaching that it is not more than three percent 44 of people are involved in agriculture it’s unbelievable 83 percent of all Indian households are in one way or the other dependent upon agriculture from produce to storage the whole chain is Medieval archaic
It is not a productive sector of our economy it is inflexible farmers are at the bursary of elements 170 000 Farmers have committed suicide in the last 15 years 95 percent of the farmers are not insured this is the sector we are calling ourselves a land of opportunities
What are we doing to this sector now let me come to what people decided to do what Narendra Modi decided to do he brought in these three Farm reforms how do you judge the success of a reform or the impact of a reform to me
I just don’t judge it by that it is required by Logic and a rational because yes every reform is required by definition because that is how human Evolutions work except sub monotheistic religions where reform is forbidden reform is essential for the development of a human being so yes
Every step every reform is important but the impact of this reform that Narendra Modi brought in would have transformed us would have catapulted us to a middle-income economy within 15 years flat by middle income I mean roughly GDP per capita becomes 14 to 15 000 right now it is two thousand dollars
And what were these three reforms the First Reform was that the farmer need not any longer be forced to sell his produce at a government Marketplace the so-called apmcs agricultural produce market committees the second reform was that we will almost abrogate the essential Commodities Act and the third reform was
That we will employ contract farming one two three these three reforms almost verbatim verbatim were in the election manifestos of not the BJP not Modi who carried out these reforms but were in the election Manifesto of the congress party you check up number 11 number 19 number
27 of the 2019 Manifesto they were in the manifesto and election Promises of up of TMC all the opposition parties wanted exactly these three reform but of even higher grade while Modi had said the farmers can be given a choice because that is the Bedrock of progress
Choice Bodhi said you give choice to the farmers you can either go to the government Mondays or you go to the private pundies Congress wanted to abrogate government is all together they said we will remove apmcs what happened the Congress before I tell you what happened the the third reform had already been
Enacted in a congress state in Punjab under Captain amrinder Singh contract farming had already been realized they were carrying it out but what happened the moment Modi brought in these three reforms black laws shut country down anti-farmer anti this anti that daily blocked five highways blocked for a year every day
The country suffered an economic loss of 3000 crores all those shops that were lining the highways they were shut Millions perhaps billions tens of billions of dollars of economic loss who is responsible for this is this a land of opportunities and then when you take these reform back re repeal the reform
The saddest day of this country according to me because the impact was for 300 million people the day you take it you do not explain it I’m sorry that was the biggest anti-national step you can think of farmers Farm reforms removing them is an anti-national step but I don’t care politicians can say
Whatever they want but the real land of opportunity is America where the people have the power they can actually file a class action suit against the government in this country 300 million farmers who were promised health wealth and prosperity by bringing these reforms should have been
Able to sue the pants of the government that you promised us this for one year you had these laws and now suddenly on your whim you say you’re taking them back give me the money that you promised right now the money that I’ve lost and
What I purport to lose for the next 15 years if we can have retrospective taxation in this country going back 10 years why can’t we have prospective asking the government to pay us what you promised us but it never happened but again I say uh I am willing to
Forgive a politician because by definition a politician has nine lives and the politician by definition is hypocritical so I don’t mind politicians doing the things they do what pained me and hurt me was that we were let down not by the legislature we were let down by the Judiciary it was
The Supreme Court whose Duty it was to make sure that when for 16 years we’ve been deliberating on these Farm reforms when every rational logical scientist Farber everyone has said these reforms are required if you read the swaminathan committee report you read tons of reports when the farmers were for it
On what basis did the Supreme Court stay these but worse than that on what basis did the Supreme Court actually say that we only see the people who are against the farm reforms I.E the protesters where are the people who are for the farm reforms we don’t see them
This is what pained me because what it tells you is that even the Judiciary is not interested in meeting out Justice it wants Anarchy did it want those millions of farmers tens of millions who were toiling in the fields in Karnataka in odisha in Tamil Nadu in Kerala to live what they are
Growing to leave what they are producing come to Supreme Court have a placard and sit there saying we demand Farm reforms is this how a democracy is supposed to work but sadly we were let down by the politicians by the Supreme Court and it goes on and on and on finally
Before I end and throw it open to the question and answer session that I am expecting would be Lively I want to talk of a couple of things the first is something that again we see in front of us but we live alone refuse to acknowledge it as
Missed opportunity we don’t even talk about it this is the sector that pains me most and this is the sector that I talk about now which is tourism this is the lowest hanging fruit India can think of we are blessed with some of the greatest creations of man or nature in this country
We are India because of those but at the end of the day it is Paris that attracts 44 million foreigners every year and it is India that attracts only 11 million foreigners Paris a small City 40 million India a glorious land of tens of thousands of historical monuments and wondrous places
Natural and man-made attracts only 11 billion only 1 million foreigners go and visit the Puri Temple only six percent of direct jobs are through tourism it should be 300 million we should be employing because we are getting 100 foreign exchange there are more hotel rooms in UAE than in India
What can I say this data is so painful I’m sorry I’m I’m giving you this data but this I think the time has come to realize about the things that we are not doing we talk of Vatican earning billions of dollars in Revenue everyone wants to go and see Vatican
The municipal budget for both Gaya that should be the Vatican of the East where Lord Buddha attained Nirvana gave uh you know uh his sermon the municipal budget of both Gaya is less than the amount it took to produce the film adipurush there are 400 million Buddhists worldwide why can’t both Gaya become
The Vatican of the East to use this phrase there are tens of thousands of examples like that what have we done the progress has been incremental a place like Mangalore we were just talking is just absolutely Divine it’s wonderful how many tourists visit Bangalore every
Year yes now we have an airport which is wonderful but other than that this is a sector that has been crying out that is crying out and I hope it doesn’t cry out in the future for a requirement not just of the government but of keeping the flame alive and finally
I come to something that first endeared me to Narendra Modi and this is something that Indians we as Indians if you don’t think about it now I think our future is very bleak in 2013 the Prime Minister said India has no business to be in business
It was one of those amazing phrases that he repeated in 2017 and again in 2019 because what he said was absolutely right government sorry did I say India has no business I meant governments have no business to be in business but unfortunately his government like every other previous government all they have
Done is to be in the business of being business a very young Economist and I took the trouble of tabulating how many public sector units we have in this country State and Central so we have around 840 1840 odd public sector units 21 of our annual budgetary allowance
That Miss Sita Raman dishes out every year 21 goes into propping up these units 400 of these are non-functional they aren’t working they aren’t units anymore but the government is paying money there was one unit that was supposed to be making chlorofluorocarbons that the government thankfully banned two years ago
Chlorofluorocarbons were banned in the late 80s by The Who because they were eating away the ozone hole but we were this kappari PSU was eating away the government thousands of crores governments cannot run businesses it goes against the Davidian Spirit of evolution of competition of fair-mindedness of ethical capitalism
But we have governments we have banks that were nationalized illegally overturning a supreme court judgment by the Congress we have government Banks that are a kind of a den for corruption we have public sector units these are the issues that will drag us down more than the land of opportunities
India Today is a land of missed opportunities because I’ll tell you how I see so many luminaries out here they have sacrificed so much trust me because they are my parents age and I know how much sacrifice they did their governments were cruel to them nehru’s governments indira’s governments
To some extent yes till till Indira Gandhi then I see people who are my age here we were ruined by the governments that ruled us Rajiv Gandhi later on going forward I don’t want the youngsters who I see here to be ruined by either the present dispensation or the ones following them
Every generation is to be a missed opportunity generation we were saved through liberalization in 1990. actually saved we had mortgaged our gold our foreign reserves right now that are 600 billion dollars were not even a billion dollars then 0.6 billion dollars we mortgaged our gold we packed our gold
Onto ships and they were about to land on the shores of England to be mortgaged with Bank of England and we say by all accounts partly it is true that narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh saved us but the ones who really saved us were the threats by the IMF and the World
Bank that if we don’t change our policies they are not going to settle our debt and give us money so we were dictated to and we changed and we changed for the better we Unshackled at least one foot but the other foot of this country is still Shackled and I want that shackle
To remove to be removed as well so that India more than being a land of missed opportunity becomes a land of opportunity thank you very much [Applause]
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