India needs Speed, Skill Scale and Decisive Leadership: Piyush Goyal
“India is poised for decadal double digit growth in the days to come and is poised to become a superpower with a billion plus happy people. India has the potential to transform and can move into the big league very rapidly if we leverage the economies of scale bring in greater degrees of transparency and monitor work that has been undertaken,” said Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy. He was addressing at the session, “Making India a Global Economic Superpower” at the Conference on Young Indians, in New Delhi on Friday.
However, adding the caveat of the need to ensure equal opportunities for people at the bottom of the pyramid, Shri Goyal said, “We cannot become a super economic power unless the person at the bottom of the pyramid gets equal opportunity to study, to be skilled and has the opportunity to move towards a better quality of life. To my mind, lack of electricity access in villages across the country is a serious concern for us as a nation. There are about 50 million homes which do not have access to electricity. In Arunachal Pradesh, there are about 808 villages which lack electricity access. While we are now working on building a grid in Sikkim and Arunachal, it will take time. Hence, we are looking at off-grid solutions in the interim.”
Talking about the great demographic dividend that India has, the Minister said that this demographic dividend is our greatest strength and we should leverage and take advantage of this. He said, “To my mind this programme can become the nucleus of a transformational initiative.”
He further mentioned that a small working group under the leadership of Nitin Gadkari has been created to evaluate 0the possibility of India making the transition to 100 per cent electric vehicles by 2030.
Highlighting the success of one of the key programmes of the Ministry of Power, Goyal said, “The LED programme in India is going to result in savings of 100 billion units of electricity annually and will benefit the consumers directly. In monetary terms, it will lead to savings of $6.5 billion annually. Given the environmental concerns, this programme will result in the reduction of about 80 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. This programme demonstrates how economies of scale can be leveraged to achieve a significant reduction in the cost of LED bulbs.”