Shri Sunil Kant Munjalji, esteemed participants in this summit and ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you for inviting me to interact with this distinguished audience in the valedictory session of the Fourth Mindmine Summit.

I must first confess to being deeply and pleasantly puzzled by the name of this summit. Mindmine. What an innovatively coined word! We have heard of iron-ore mine, coal mine, copper mine and, at a higher end of the value chain, gold mine and diamond mine. But the word ‘mindmine’ conjures up an entity that is at once unfamiliar and familiar. Unlike other mines, here both the mine and what is mined from it are non-material and intangible. Yet, its product is more valuable than the most precious diamond discovered anywhere in the world.

Is there anything in the world more weighty and valuable than a great idea thought up by a brilliant mind? Adi Shankaracharya thought of touring the entire land of Bharat and establishing four maths at its four corners. By implementing that idea within a lifespan of only 32 years, he strengthened the spiritual unity of our nation. Albert Einstein thought of relativity and it revolutionized physics and the way we look at matter and energy. Someone in Google thought of a search engine, and someone in Wikipedia thought of a digital encyclopedia and the two ideas have now made anybody, anywhere, anytime to mine the information that he or she wants about anything from any corner of the world.
 
The second puzzling aspect of mining the mind for ideas is that this mind is possessed by every human being on earth. God has endowed every man and woman with body, mind and soul. A country may or many not have a gold mine or a diamond mine. But each of its citizens has a mind that that is potentially a repository of ideas that benefit the individual, the country and the world at large.

But mining the mind is not easy. It requires good education, good upbringing, good environment, good workplaces and fulfillment of basic human needs.

I have always believed that India’s greatest resource is its human resource. Our most precious wealth is our billion-plus minds, along with the rich heritage of arts, culture, science, technology, philosophy and spiritualism that the minds of the past have created for the present and future generations. In addition, we have bountiful natural resources.

With all these resources, there is no reason why India cannot be a strong and prosperous nation, free of poverty and want, and full of peace, harmony and justice. This is what our greatest philosophers, poets and social reformers had envisioned. This is what all the great leaders of our freedom movement had dreamed of.

Yet, sadly, this is not the case today.

India has no doubt achieved a lot in the past six decades since Independence. And all of us are proud of these achievements. Who cannot be proud of India sending its own satellite, built by its own space scientists and engineers, to the Moon? Who is not proud of the fact that India has emerged as a software power in the world and that the entire world is applauding the talent of our IT workforce? And how can we not be proud of the fact that, in spite of India’s unparalleled diversities, we have remained united and preserved our democracy against all odds? Some of our companies have now become truly world-class in manufacturing excellence. The Hero group of Munjals is one of them. These are our collective national achievements, not the achievements of this or that party.

However, this national pride cannot mask what we have failed to achieve so far.

• Thousands of debt-ridden farmers in India have committed suicide in recent years.
  
  
• 50% of our population has very limited access to safe drinking water and 70% of it lacks proper sanitation.
  
  
• About 2.5 crore Indians suffer from physical and mental disabilities.
  
  
• Our internal security has become so imperiled that more people died in India in terrorist strikes than any country in the world with the exception of Iraq.
  
  
• Last year’s ranking for India in the United Nations Human Development Index was 128, out of 177 countries.
  
  
• Transparency International, which tracks the level of corruption in various countries around the world, has ranked India at 74 in the world. Most recently, we have seen a corporate scandal of monumental proportions, which was also simultaneously a governmental scandal.
  
  
• We are proud of our system of parliamentary democracy, but last year we saw the most shameful scandal of political corruption in the form of “Cash for Votes”.
  
  
• India ranks 122 in the ease of doing business, according to a report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Which means that businesses face unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles, which cause delay in implementation and costs to escalate. It is the country and its people who have to pay the price due to these avoidable difficulties.

The list can be made longer by adding many more examples. But it is sufficiently illustrative to tell us that we carry a heavy burden of challenges and responsibilities to bridge the gap between What Is and What Ought To Be.

In addition to the longstanding challenges before the nation, we now have an economic crisis that is affecting every section of society. In the letter that Shri Munjal ji wrote to me, he mentioned that some reports suggest that there have been 50 lakh job losses because of the slowdown. Then he added, “In fact that too may be a gross understatement.” This shows the extent of the crisis.

Hence, there is all-round atmosphere of despair and insecurity due to joblessness, price rise and terrorism. Those who have caused this despair by failing to deliver on their promises to the electorate in 2004 do not deserve to be re-elected. They must be discarded.

It is against this backdrop that India is going to elect the 15th Lok Sabha in the next couple of months. My Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and our alliance, the National Democratic Alliance, are seeking a mandate from the people with the promise of making a decisive change in the way India has been governed in the past five years. Our pledge is to vigorously pursue the ideals of GOOD GOVERNANCE, DEVELOPMENT and CHANGE.

• We shall adopt a zero-tolerance approach towards terrorism. The days of endangering national unity and security by playing vote-bank politics will be over.
  
  
• Ours is a government committed to taking right decisions, firm decisions and quick decisions. The dangerous drift that the people have come to see in governance at the Centre will not be continued.
  
  
• Institutions of governance will not be misused to protect our own people and to vindictively target our opponents.
  
  
• In particular, the high office of Prime Minister will not be devalued.
  
  
• We shall be uncompromising in combating corruption, especially in high place. People can have no faith in the system of governance if law-breakers in politics and the corporate sector are allowed to go scot-free.

Which is why, I regard the investigation into the Satyam/Maytas scandal as an acid test of governance. It was a combination of accounting fraud, financial fraud, political fraud and governmental fraud. The whole world is watching how the UPA Government is going to deal with this issue. The initial indications of course suggest that a cover-up operation is on.

Since a good number of participants in this summit are, I presume, associated with the corporate sector, I have an appeal to make. Good Corporate Governance is as important for businessmen to practice as Good Governance is for politicians to practice.

Friends, in the letter I received from Shri Munjal, he had suggested that I should share my thoughts on how what India needs to do in order to go to achieve 10% GDP growth. I shall not present a comprehensive perspective on this issue here, since our colleagues are working on our Agenda of Governance which will address this and many other issues. I can however say this much that, even though we are firmly committed to achieving a much higher rate of employment-oriented economic growth, I believe that GDP is not an abstract concept. The common man does not even know what GDP means.
 
Which is why, speaking on this issue sometime back, I had stated that for me GDP means one in which G stands for Good Governance at all levels; D stands for Development for all sections of society and all regions of the country; and P stands for Protection for all citizens.

It is our assurance to the people of India that we shall replace the mood of despair and insecurity and uncertainty with an atmosphere of hope, security and confidence.

Because INDIA DESERVES BETTER.

Lastly, I seek your IDEAS and your PARTICIPATION first in bringing about a change at the Centre and thereafter for a positive transformation in governance.

My colleagues have been doing many things in the campaign, including many innovative things. For example, the website they have created for me is, I can say, the most interactive among all the political websites in India. We have over 3,000 persons who have become members of the Discussion Forums. Over 5,000 online volunteers have enrolled themselves from all over the country to participate in the campaign.

I can humbly say that my colleagues have done some MIND-MINING and come up with these new ways of campaigning. I believe that our democracy will become richer, and the coming elections will become more vibrant, if more and more people participate.

Thank you.