U.S. President Donald Trump will see a different India than President Carter or President Clinton said Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest person and chairman of Reliance Industries (RIL) in a fireside chat with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella at the Future Decoded CEO Summit in Mumbai on Monday.
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“I think that as we are speaking, President Trump has arrived in Ahmedabad, and the India that he will see in 2020 is very different from the India that either President Carter saw or Clinton saw when he came in ... or even Obama. We are having millions of people in the street. Each one of them is having their own personal experience with their phones, and the networks strong enough. And I think, like, I can easily say that the mobile networks in India now are better or at par with anybody else in the world. And that’s the big change when he reaches the stadium. We talked about stadium, the infrastructure in that stadium in terms of digital is better than any other place in the world. So that is the India as we start in 2020,” said Mr. Ambani.
According to Mr. Ambani, India’s time has come as the country is set to become one of the top three economies in the world, and technology will play a big role in that journey.
“There is no doubt in anyone’s mind (on India becoming the third-largest economy). We may argue if it will happen in five or 10 years. If you didn’t even think about when your own journey and think about 1992 when you join Microsoft, India was $300 billion. Today, India is $3 trillion,” said Mr. Ambani. He said growth in the economy will be marked by India’s emergence as the world’s ‘most premium digital society.”
Talking about entrepreneurs in India, Mr. Ambani said, “Every small businessman or entrepreneur in India has the potential to become a Dhirubhai Ambani or a Bill Gates. That is what differentiates India from the rest of the world.”
Reminiscing how Reliance was founded as a startup with a table and a chair and a thousand rupees about five decades ago by his father Dhirubhai Ambani, Mukesh Ambani said the entrepreneurial power that India has at the grassroots is enormous.
“We have to realise that for India, they (MSMEs) provide 70% of India’s employment, drive 40% of India’s exports and are critical to all the economic activity that we see and they have done this with zero technical enablements and adoption,” said Ambani.
On partnership with Microsoft, Mr. Ambani said the partnership with Microsoft will be the defining partnership of the decade.
