:: IISWBM - Template ::

Address by Shri Shekhar Dutt, Deputy National Security Adviser at the Convocation of the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management Kolkata 20 December 2007

I am honoured for the opportunity to address the Convocation of the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management (IISWBM). Today is a red letter day in the life of my young friends who have successfully completed their studies in this famous temple of learning.

I am sure that you must have given your best and burned the midnight oil to-be present here today to receive your degrees. Please do accept my heartfelt congratulations on this important day in your lives. I must also felicitate the faculty for providing you the ambience and for their untiring efforts to share their knowledge with you adding to your education and making you responsible citizens of our motherland. In the process, besides what you would have learned through the lectures and assignments. I am sure that you would have been made more conscious that education must teach us not only "what to think" but more importantly "how to think". It must not only provide answers but generate questions for further inquiry and research.

As a man who had served the nation in uniform, I am especially delighted to be here in the city of Joy. It is here, 26 years and four days ago, when the Eastern Command of the Army spearheaded the effort that carved the victory for India in the 1971 India-Pakistan war. Now you may be asking yourself the question: what is the relevance of military victory in a convocation ceremony? The answer should bring smiles to your faces. Sound management is as important to the military establishment as it is to economic enterprises. Earlier, it was the management gurus who borrowed heavily from the military. Today the flow seems to be in the reverse direction. The management principles have become so scientific that military can only ignore them at its peril. Interestingly, in today's exploding frontiers of knowledge, the military is now learning from B schools. Management professors are now lecturing military leaders on the nuances of human resource management and how to get better yield from resources.

Fighting a war for instance, is no different than management of a project. Efficient and cost effective methods that are the guiding principles of management of economic entities are equally relevant to war and its execution. Therefore, I am fully appreciative of the efforts the teachers of B Schools and those involved in scripting marketing thoughts for extracting the best practices from all disciplines to develop newer methods of management.

I need to hardly emphasise that our nation is on the path to greater glory. Knowledge base which is the key stone to development is gaining in depth and size. We have the right ingredients to be one of the advanced knowledge-based economies by virtue of our human resource strength." Among the 102 countries listed in World Economic Forum, India ranks third as far as availability of engineers and scientists is concerned and its quality of management schools comes eighth. But our educational institutions are ranked 28, while

the quality of its research institutions stands at 20. Therefore, we would need to yoke ourselves to the commitment for greater educational progress.

The knowledge explosion has also thrown up new challenges.

The first is that the syllabus, study material and teaching methods need to be revised in near real time. Secondly, at the same time, we would need to be innovative. Here we need to re-read the meaning of "innovation". Peter Drucker, the classical management guru saw innovation as "the change that creates a new dimension in performance". Innovation is thus not invention, nor is it basic research, but essentially some form of improvement that adds value to existing process or product.

The teaching faculty thus has to innovate for the students to reach "out of the box" solutions. Both scarcity and need are the twin movers of innovation. Thus we need to stop learning and doing by rote and strive to improve our mindset. Yet we know how we are good at abstract thinking. But we need to be practical too. We have classic case studies of the successful, innovative and creative stories of Amul dairy, the Mumbai dabbawallas (lunch carriers), shampoo in sachet to reach rural markets and cell phone explosion to name few.

But we need to do better and this casts a great responsibility on the teaching faculty. I am glad that your institute is first an institute of social welfare and second, a business management institute. Unlike some other B-schools I am proud that your institution has accepted this important responsibility of contributing and innovating for the welfare of our less

fortunate brothers. When we look at the overall incidence of poverty in our country, it would be abundantly clear as to why we need to pay greater attention to social welfare. It would not require any complicated analyses to reach this conclusion.

The economic reforms ushered in the early 1990s did indeed

unleash our private entrepreneurship and our potential. We are now free of the license Raj era and are one of the fastest growing economies of the world. We are touching an annual growth of nearly 9% and for a nation like India, this is enviable. But the fruits of economic prosperity that were spawned by our policy of liberalization has not percolated to our rural populace to the extent that it has befitted the urban population. The number of people living below poverty line according to 2004-05 estimates is a whopping 238.5 million. And poverty here shockingly means those who earn less than Rs. 296 per month in urban areas and Rs. 276 per month in rural areas.

Going beyond GDP, our Human Development Index, which is a composite measure of the various dimensions of human development, places India at 128 out of 177 countries. We are behind even Morocco and Equatorial Guinea. The seriousness of the problem becomes evident when one realizes how wide-spread poverty continues to be in India. To give 100 days of guaranteed wage employment to the rural households in a financial year in India, under the ambitious rural job guarantee scheme or the NREGA, Rs.20,000 crores would be required annually. This is where the importance of management is underlined. It is critically important to apply sound principles of management to implement such a socially and economically important scheme with such a gigantic outlay, for instance. But we would require a socially committed cadre of managers from those who are present here and others, to ensure that we deploy our resources effectively. I am sure that many of you would be wooed by multinationals which are now thronging our shores. While I cannot grudge the preferences of many of yours and the reasons you have for accepting such offers, I would beseech you to at some point of time in your career, to lend your expertise for development projects in the country. In doing so, you would realise that your efforts would not only socially uplift the poor in our country, but also increase their purchasing power leading to the generation of greater demand of goods and services of their choice. This would itself lead to the creation of more industries and services which would provide better employment opportunities for managers of tomorrow. Therefore, it is a win-win situation and not a zero sum game.

In the words of the most famous son of Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore, "The highest education is that which does not merely give us information, but makes our life in harmony with all existence".

I also understand that there are many from the B schools who are preferring to work in rural areas resisting the temptations of fast cars and candle light dinners. I salute such young people, who like in our freedom struggle gave up lucrative and sheltered career in law and other professions for our freedom. Social welfare now demands a new and vigorous revival with an intense passion for spreading the fruits of economic growth in an inclusive manner. It is only in this way, can we fulfill the vision of Pandit Nehru, who laid the foundation stone of this Institute and said that IISWBM is the first institute which has married the goals of social welfare and business management.

We should not decide our future on short term goals. It is true that the service and industrial sectors contribute the lion's share to our GDP, but more than 60 per cent Indians are directly dependent on the primary sector or agriculture. This segment has very poor landless marginalized people many of who are migrating in large numbers to the cities. Here as future leaders and workers we need to connect with this reality. Thus we must be sensitive to the plight of our rural and urban poor.

Our stock markets alone cannot be the barometer of growth or welfare. There can be no sustainable and successful business without a sense of corporate social responsibility. I am certain that when you enter the real world, you should carry this important message. There needs to be a trickle down effect. The boats of all people need to rise with the rising tide of prosperity. Today the problem is not from a revolution of rising expectations, but from the revolution of unfulfilled expectations. We have to cater for human security by providing our people the conditions that give them freedom from fear and want. As we follow the path of a creative formation and economic models solely dependent on profits, we may not be addressing the social needs.

Towards this end, I am happy to see that IISWBM has helped in creating a pool of social scientists and entrepreneurs with a spirit for rural development and creating small and medium enterprises. During the last five decades this institute has produced over 12,000 graduates in social welfare and business management who have taken up important assignments in social work and industry. In the years to come, I am confident that this institute will generate a larger pool of societal transformers and entrepreneurs with the object of promoting economic development in the country, particularly in the rural sector.

Across the border in Bangladesh we need to emulate the innovation of Mohammad Yunus the Nobel laureate who had the intellectual motivation to see through and observe a window of opportunity by way such a simple looking thing as micro credits. He combined and balanced social welfare with business management.

Now armed with degrees and diplomas you, young ladies and gentlemen, have level playing fields in the business of application of your knowledge with true innovation.

I cannot but recall that I had also played a small part in shaping the curriculum of your Institute. I had the opportunity of facilitating introduction of the Post Graduate Diploma Programme in Sports Management. Sporting activities as you know, build team spirit. This is required for growth in all fields of human endeavors. Some games are individualistic, but most games are team work. As students you may have been pre-dominantly individualistic in your approach. But in future, you will need to manage teams of your organization. The import of this is that sports gives us a spirit of adventure, of give and take. It builds our character. We now do not need few gladiators. We need participatory management. I am sure with the outlook of a sportsperson, when we leave the portals of this school, we will have found that cohesion comes by team work. As leaders of management, the same rules apply. The strength of a team is directly related to its weakest link as in a chain. We need to strengthen the weak links in our economy, society and polity just as a sports captain would make his team do.

With these thoughts I thank all of you, respected gurus and my young friends for giving me this opportunity to deliver the address. I wish all of you God speed, a prosperous future in which you are going to be responsible and I dare say, accountable in transforming our country to the status of a prosperous and egalitarian society.