Part - I

When I look at our country today, I find that we are like Hanuman before the Lanka leap.
We are at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. Naturally, our mind goes back to the last 53 years of our history as an independent nation. We are also tempted to take a look at the future.

What must be our vision for India? Everyone say's India must become an economic and military superpower. The next question is how do we realize this vision? We must begin with an analysis of our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Prof. C. K. Prahalad popularized the concept of core competence as an important input in the competitive advantage of an enterprise. If we think about the core competence of our country, what can be our competence? We can perhaps look at core competences of India as a nation, even though we know that as a nation we are not competing with anybody else. Perhaps an appreciation of the core competences of India as a nation may help us if we are policy makers to design, better policies, which will improve our position. If we are corporate executives, this can help us to come with strategies, which will make our organizations successful in a competitive environment.

In the last one decade, India has begun to grow fast. Census 2000 noted that in the decade 1990-2000, literacy figures rose from 52 per cent to 65 per cent. The biggest gains were reported from among the backward social groups and in the most backward states. India today has around 35 million cable television homes - more than all of Latin America put together. The number of telephones in the same period increased from 5 million in 1990 to more than 30 million by 2000. The Department of Telecommunications modernized its equipment and laid 76,000 km of fibre optic cable, which stands out as a substantial achievement.

India Rising!

• Today around 2 million new mobile connections are sold each month. That's expected to climb to between 2.5 million and 3 million monthly by next year.

• The auto industry should be making 1 million vehicles a year by 2005-06.

• There will be over 70,000 bank branches and almost 200,000 ATMs by 2009.

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* Contributed by: -
Vikash Kumar Sinha,
School of Communication and Management Studies,
Cochin, Kerela.