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Thought provoking. Worth watching. Don’t agree with a few things. He is a fantastic, articulate speaker though. The point he makes on learning to live peacefully in an ecosystem is outstanding. Also effectively addresses the arrogance with which we (analysts) look at India unInc.
What are the competitive advantages of India unInc? One of them, as articulated so well in the talk, is flexibility and nimbleness.
Another one is cost. However it’s important to recognise that a significant proportion of India unInc’s cost advantage comes from cutting corners. For example by not paying full taxes. Or by having a much lower, and unfair, raw material cost advantage.
Take the example of street bookseller cited in the talk. Maybe I am wrong about this, but my impression from past experience is that a lot of the books which are sold on the streets are pirated. So the cost to street vendor is much lower than the cost to an “organized” book store
What India unInc doesn’t have is scale economics. So there are two offsetting factors relating to cost. Cost advantage due to cutting corners and a cost disadvantage due to lack of scale.
In terms of employment generation, I completely agree with the speaker. If we don’t solve the employment problem, there will be very adverse social consequences for society. And IndiaInc won’t do it. Only India unInc can.
The reason IndiaInc won’t do it because IndiaInc doesn’t live inside a cocoon. It competes with other large businesses around the world and everywhere you look you’ll find pressure to reduce labour costs through automation etc.
If IndiaInc has to effectively compete in the world, it will have keep automating and lowering labour cost per unit of production. Otherwise it will become uncompetitive.
So the demographic time bomb we are sitting on (large number of unemployed people) cannot be addressed by IndiaInc. That’s a key point of the talk. And I agree with the speaker on this.
He gives some very useful ideas which all of us can implement in our own small ways. They are worth exploring.
All in all, a wonderful talk, and I enjoyed it. Even though I am a business school prof. 🤡 
