Lauding the private sector’s role in driving India’s economic growth, country’s top industrialist Mukesh Ambani on Sunday urged the government to move faster in its decision making and put to rest any notion about policy paralysis due to political constraints.
He also called for a dramatic shift in the governance model for better partnership between the government and the private sector in delivering more value to each other, and the society at large.
Speaking at the opening session of the annual Indian Chapter of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Mumbai, Ambani said the corporate sector wants both the central and state governments to “align and move a lot faster”, remove the mismatch prevailing in their approaches, and speed up the decision making process.
He said the private industry has now become a driver, from a facilitator, of India’s economic growth.
“I think there is a mismatch. We are both heading to the same direction and sometimes, like you have seen in the US and Europe, that’s the price of democracy, but we shouldn’t put a thing by saying that because the institutions of democracy are there, we will be paralysed.
“And because there is an opposition and a party in power, we would do nothing. That’s what worries me,” he said, while urging for a minimum agreement to deliver on the expectations of the people.
Ambani, head of India’s largest corporate entity Reliance Industries and the country’s richest person, also acknowledged that the government was taking steps in that direction.
Paralysis in policy decisions and government inaction on important economic issues has been a matter of debate in the recent past, with many industry leaders seeking urgent steps from policy-makers to tackle the problem.
Ambani said there was a need to “put our heads down and figure out how do we deliver in terms of making sure that all the framework is defined, at the same time we are still able to move fast.
“… We need to get a minimum agreement in terms of saying that at the end of the day we are there working for all people and we have to have a pathway to move into the 21st century governance so that the rules are redefined and we can meet the aspirations of the millions of our young people.”
Corporate leader Azim Premji, Chairman of IT giant Wipro, recently criticised the government for its failure to address the economic issues.
“The biggest concern is over the governance issues. There is complete absence of decision-making among the leaders in the government,” Premji had said earlier in the month.
These comments came after a group of prominent personalities, including Premji, Mahindra group’s Keshub Mahindra and HDFC’s Deepak Parekh, in an open letter to the national leadership had expressed concerns over a series of scams leading to what they termed as “governance deficit”.
However, another industry leader Sunil Mittal of Bharti Group differed with this stance and recently said that “business is better than perception” in the country.
Praising the government for its initiatives to deal with the current economic issues, Mittal had said after a meeting with the Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee that the government was taking various pro-active steps.
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