Ideas will flourish if they are encouraged, says Suresh Prabhu

Ideas need a conducive atmosphere to be born and take shape and the government is trying to provide just that, Suresh Prabhu, Union Minister for Commerce & Industry, and Civil Aviation, has said. “Some ideas survive and some don’t. Nature doesn’t allow all its creations to survive. What we have to do is create an enabling environment to allow ideas to be born,” Prabhu said during a panel discussion at the BusinessLine Changemaker awards on Friday.

‘How welcoming is India to change makers?’ was the topic of the discussion with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder of Naukri.com. BusinessLine Editor Raghavan Srinivasan moderated the discussion.

Referring to the Prime Minister’s start-up programme, the Minister said that it was a much needed policy decision that was serving as an inspiration. “I was in Gujarat University interacting with students. There were such brilliant start-up ideas being discussed. What they needed was transformation,” the Minister said, emphasising that there was no dearth of brilliant minds in the country.

“In a system where new ideas will be encouraged, new ideas will flourish. That is exactly what we are doing,” the Minister said.

While the country was brimming with new ideas, the Minister pointed out that in the realm of social movements, there was a slack.

“In India, social movements, which used to unleash social change, have gone missing today. Therefore the government is having to step in. The government is trying to introduce some of the elements of transformational change through its programmes,” Prabhu said. Programmes such as ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padao’ and the ‘Clean India’ campaign are designed to bring about a social change, he said.

‘Status quo must go’

Bikhchandani pointed out that almost all establishments tend to be status quoist and institutes try to preserve what there is. “For a change to happen, the impetus mostly comes from outside. And change takes time,” he said.

Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, had come with his experiences from another country to bring about a number of transformational changes in India, he said.

It needed pressure from an outside institution like the World Bank for India to liberalise, he added.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, came from outside (a State government), Bikhchandani said, noting that Arvind Kejriwal, who, too, was an outsider, was indeed making changes.