Where should India invest next? The debate around this magnificent question came to a fore at this weekend’s India Conference at Harvard. This year’s theme of “India vs. India—Local Strength or Global Growth?” compels a decision to embrace India’s daunting complexity and seeming incoherence rather than oversimplifying the hackneyed ‘growth story’. Despite the dire snowfall warnings, the 2013 India Conference, presented by students at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business Schools, boasted its largest attendance yet, at over 600 attendees. Now in its tenth year, it is the largest student-run India conference in the country and has historically drawn students, professors, entrepreneurs, local professionals, and India enthusiasts from across the world.

Over the course of the first day, Harvard’s legendary Kennedy School stage was host to 22 ministers, ambassadors, foundation directors, global entrepreneurs, and a host of other voices from across the professional and ideological spectrum. Saturday’s panels were related to government and development issues; the individual panels focused on questions such as how to involve India’s massive middle class and hefty diaspora of high net-worth individuals in philanthropic giving, where to find a place for rural India in a growth narrative that has thus far marginalized it as a burden, how to drive systemic change in education, and why the Indian political scene is so unattractive to its young people.

The daunting nature of India’s systemic and infrastructural challenges was described in great detail by the conference’s four Saturday keynotes. Mr. Ashok Alexander, formerly country director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, spoke at length about the need to rise above the standard reaction of paralysis in the face of complexity. Ambassador Arun Singh of the U.S. Embassy mentioned the many colors of India and the difficulty they pose when viewed through the lens of U.S. cooperation, despite recent progress in collaborative research. Sh.Ajay Maken, Minister of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, proposed that Indian policymakers took a decade to accept the inevitability of urbanization, and have since realized its actual desirability. Finally, Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure, spoke about radicalizing democracy by making information dramatically more available to a new generation of Indians.

On Sunday, the conference shifted to the Harvard Business School to explore questions around where the private sector should make its bets. 28 speakers propelled forward several critical debates: Where should inspiration for the next wave of healthcare innovation come from? How can modern social enterprises scale profitably while remaining relevant to distinct local contexts? Should the tech sector in India continue to proliferate its current role in the global value chain, or focus on developing a vertically integrated Silicon Valley of its own? What dominant investment thesis will return GDP growth to its hey-days almost a decade ago? Broadly speaking, will increased participation in local markets or global markets become necessary tools for today’s businesses to thrive?

The day kicked off with one of the weekend’s most celebrated panels, in which Shereen Bhan of CNBC India moderated a panel on the way forward for Indian women in business. Iconic leaders like Debjani Ghosh and Aruna Jayanthi highlighted the critical tension between whether women require special treatment in the workplace or not in order to succeed given contemporary cultural challenges. Other panels during the day delved into topics including emerging innovations in refrigerated transport with hopeful implications for the dairy industry, and the increasing need for a supportive investor network to catalyze India’s incipient entrepreneurship landscape. Ashish Singh, Chairman and Founder of Bain India, highlighted several sectorial trends, including the sustained importance of FDI in Retail, the “premiumization” of the fast-moving-consumer-goods category amongst MNCs and local brands, and even suggested the diminishing ability of large conglomerates to successfully grow multiple core categories simultaneously. The action-packed day closed with UTV Motion Pictures CEO and Disney Studios MD Siddharth Roy Kapur, who offered his optimistic outlook for evolving audience tastes in Indian entertainment, amongst the local market as well as NRI’s.

As the controversial conference theme points out, there will never be one simple story for the colorful ecosystem of a complicated country like India. But, given the steadfast determination of the academics and professionals even in the face of this reality, it’s perhaps evident that we share one united place after all: as lovers of knowledge, and believers in more uniquely Indian and unthinkably bright narratives the world has never seen before. India vs. India is not a question of which story will triumph—but of how we create a path that allows the country to triumph. The Harvard India Conference’s answer, evidently, is an optimistic one.

Congratulations to the Conference Co-Chairs:

Rohin Aggarwal, Aashish Barwale, Shivi Chandra, Anand Dureja, Kavikrut, Divya Jain, Piyush Jain, Mitakshara Kumari, Aarti Saxena and their team for organizing this great conference.

For more photos

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/59nxjbvyw10cuwt/QVw1bJQf8J?lst#f:IMG_1389.JPG

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