Advantage India: From Challenge to Opportunity

• Late President A P J Abdul Kalam was a tad cautious about ‘Make in India’ campaign saying though it’s “quite ambitious”, it has to be ensured that India does not become the low-cost, low-value assembly line of the world. 

• On Digital India, he felt it has the potential to activate the knowledge connectivity needed in villages and remote areas and “we need to bridge the gaps of lower level of literacy, language and customised content, though” 
  

• These views are expressed in the soon-to-be published “Advantage India: From Challenge to Opportunity”, one of the last books written by Kalam along with his aide Srijan Pal Singh. 

• The book, published by HarperCollins India, also has his unfinished speech of July 27 at IIM-Shillong where he collapsed only to breathe his last hours later.

• Worried about Politics:
• According to Kalam, there is a distinct feeling that politics is fast evolving into a game of musical chairs where the same set of leaders, or their favoured few, occupy the seats of power with huge entry barriers for others. “Where this set of leaders lacks integrity, the baton passes from one corrupt leader to another who is part of this set.

•  Politics needs streamlined processes for the people to pluck out and permanently discard the corrupted and also a mechanism by which fresh talent and creative leaders can find their way into the system, using ethical means,” he wrote. 

• On the election process, he wrote that proliferation of parties has significantly added to the burden of elections on the nation, and also distorted the political equations post elections, leading to the spread of corruption.

•  “The debauchery of the political leaders perhaps hurts the citizens more than any other form of corruption… When the leadership turns indifferent, corrupt or callous, it is a breach of faith and a shattering of hope. 

• “But apathy and indifference was never, and will never be, an answer. It is not difficult to fathom that political corruption is easily the most dangerous of all forms. In any mature or emerging democracy, the quality of the political leadership can mean the difference between a welfare state and a bankrupt one,” he wrote.