To transform India’s economy, there is a need to reduce “friction” in businesses and create an “environment” wherein the government has more trust in its entrepreneurs, Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy has said.
For the transformation of the Indian economy, he said it is essential for the younger generation to be daring and that India is integrated with the global economy.
“We still have a little bit of work in reducing friction to businesses. We need to create an environment where the Government has more trust in its entrepreneurs than it is today,” Murthy, 70, told students of the prestigious Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia here.
Murthy, the recipient of the 2017 Thomas Jefferson Foundation medal in Global Innovation, was responding to Darden School of Business Dean Scott Beardsley who asked, “what do you think needs to happen next to transform India’s economy. What is next”.
“We want our youngsters to be a little bit more daring in taking the entrepreneurial route more and more than the extent to which they do today. We have to become much more integrated to the world economy so that we can consider the entire world as our market and can become globally competitive.
“And most importantly we can become much more open minded to learn from the wonderful things that are happening in this country and elsewhere. I would say these are required (for transforming India’s economy to the next level),” Murthy said.
He, however, refrained from elaborating what the Indian Government needs to do to create the environment of trust in its entrepreneurs and said, “I will tell you why, as an Indian citizen, it may not be proper if I were to be critical about India when I am outside India”.
Interacting with students, he said, challenges for entrepreneurs are now different than the time when he started Infosys. Those days access to capital was almost non-existent and government was a big irritant.
“Today, challenges are different. But in some sense even more complex, because today’s entrepreneurs have to be much more smarter than what we were because there is so much of competition on a global scale. Before you can say this can be done, somebody else may have already done it.