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An Interview with APJ Abdul Kalam about "India 2020", Times of India, 1998

$'No Indian will be below poverty line by 2020’ · line The first thing that strikes one about Dr APJ Abdul Kalam and Dr YS Rajan's book, India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium (Penguin-Viking) is its positive tone. Seldom does one, in these troubled times, see such a lucid marshalling of facts and figures to bolster the thesis that India is a mere two decades away from super power status. Sitting in his South Block office surrounded by models of Prithvi and Agni missiles, the Arjun tank along with a bust of the mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan, Abdul Kalam, 65, insists that technology holds the key to usher in such a revolution. India needs to enhance its pool of indigenous technology which will serve as a spring board for change. A man who has always be- lieved in team work, he insists that every reply he gives is further elaborated upon by his colleague and co-author Dr Rajan who has put in a long innings with the Indian Space Research Organi- sation. Excerpts from an interview with Rashme Sehgal: clear reactors; devel- serves. This raw material can be op nuclear medicine: Have you taken into account the used to develop our industries by create energy from political volatility that has been entering into a series of collabora- caused by a successive series of tive ventures It is the same in the defence sector we can coalition governments? What area of health. We have a popula- build our own mis- about the bureaucratic inertia and tion of one billion people. Joint ventures must be undertaken for tanks, build our own f you read the last paragraph of medicines and for development of on this in our book. nuclear power, in the siles, our own battle bungling? commercialisation of important clectronic systems; and last but the last chapter of our book, you newer vaccinations not least, in the areas will find us pointing out that what- Your book has alse mentioned of information tech- ever maybe the political ideology nology, our software of the government of the day, there that national economies that are and "hardware sys- is no dispute about our desire to overly dependent on exports can tems enjoy interna- become a developed nation. It is tional standing. What about the prob- Once the missions in different ar have faced economic upheavals lems of unemploy- cas are in place, people will work but India has a much more bal- ment, disease, ilitera for change. This is not something anced philosophy. We cannot for- g and poverty? Your out of the realm of possibility. book has mentioned that twenty years school children in Hyderabad, I down the line we will asked a young girl what was her and export are balanced. warfare run into trouble? an accepted goal for the nation. Many South East Asian nations get that our domestic market is a great stabiliser. Take the example with of Japan where technology import Q& A\APJAbdul Kalam During interaction an Q: What led you to write this areas book? dream for India. She replied, "Un- You have been quoted as saying Your book has an extremely posi- Despite these problems, we be- cle, I want to live in a developed trength respects strength. Was clear devices and what was the need to do se at that particular ports, we have quoted predictions Another aspect stressed in your time. By doing so has our country There are day-to-day irritants in made by some experis that the book is the need to develop self- emerged any the stronger? A nation's national strength has be importing food items. The sixties saw a change come about in our body politic. As a na- concentrate on core strengths. A: We were both born before In- the seeding for independence took goals and a galloping population place in 1857. The first vision of the to match. We now believe the time nation state of India began to has come for the nation to be pre- emerge somewhere during that sented with a second vision where- period. When the vision was ac- cepted, the dynamics to free the country were set in place. It took us 90 years to gain our freedom. But the crucial point is that these years were able to throw up the best of leaders whether in the fields of technology, industry. philosophy or political life. People ike JRD Tata, JC Bose, CV Řa- ourselves. On the issue of food im- book to her. our day-to-day life. What makes you feel so optimistic? any society but in order to gain a perspective on what should be the vision of a nation we have to study long term trends coming years will see us import food grain to the tune of fourteen million tonnes. But we have also quoted other agricultural experts reliance. by we can graduate from a devel- oping to a developed nation. Tech- nology will provide the tool to Merely importing technologies from outside will not bring about two components - economy and national security. They are both in- ter-related and flow from the tech- nologies available within a coun- try. Thave never said that defence prosperity. In order to become a prosperous nation, we must devel- op desgns that can be used com- who claim we will be able to reach a production target of 300 million tonnes of food grain within this time span. We are confident that poverty bring about this transformation. Five years ago, I was made chair- man for the Technology Informa- tion Forecasting and Assessment Council which is an autonomous society. We shortlisted 500 areas and asked 5000 senior people in What we have attempted to do is zero in on our core strengths Onlv five or six years ago, would people have believed that India would be able to develop one billion dollars worth of software? We have fo- cused on certain prime areas in mercially. The developed nations put constraints on the transfer of iechnology. We are also advocating will be substantially reduced and joint development of technologies that no Indian will be living below Nowadays a given product is otten alone will provide superior strength. When our Prime Minister has stated that there will be no fur- ther tests, our mission objective had been achieved. One thing i and a gamut of political leaders came to the forefront at that time. It was the vision that created the leaders And it was their far-sight- edness that helped us work to- wards gaining self reliance in many search, medicine etc., to provide us with inputs in their respective fields. I was also able to interact with people from all walks of life. Not all sectors could be addressed in this book; rather we decided to our problems To list some of these arcas, our food productivity has in- creased; today we can launch our own communication satellites; we have our own remote sensor de- vices; we can build our own nu- lieve that once food and job avail- ability increase, this will have a triggering effect on the whole economy. We also believe this can be achieved without huge capital investments and have elaborated iechnologies. This is true in most sectors ranging from engineering or software. The emphasis should be on working jointly. Take the ex- ample of a resource like titanium in which we have tremendous re- want any country to tell me, espe- cially the G- 5 nations, what my country should do in order to build its own security umbrella. Security is a prime need but every nation must decide this for itself$

Superpower by 2020

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