CII Communique - February, 2010

india & the world
spotlight
CII at
From Top
Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, CII, Anand Sharma, Minister
of Commerce & Industry, India, and Suresh Vaswani, Jt CEO, IT
Business, and Member of the Board, Wipro Ltd, at the Wipro-CII
Bollywood Music Nite
Venu Srinivasan, President, CII, and CMD, TVS Motor Company;
HRH Prince Philippe of Belgium and Hari S Bhartia, Vice President,
CII and Co-Chairman & MD, Jubilant Organosys, at the CII India
Reception
Rajendra S Pawar, Chairman, NIIT Group, & Neeti Pawar,
Sunita Kalyani & Baba N Kalyani, CMD, Bharat Forge, Manish Kejriwal,
Sr MD, Temasek Holdings Advisors India Ltd, Venu Srinivasan, and
Chandrajit Banerjee
The Annual Meeting of the World Economic
Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, is on
the calendar of top corporates the world
over. Continuing its agenda of leveraging the
Meeting as a platform for building India Brand, CII
organised a 100-member strong delegation to Davos
led by Cabinet Ministers Mr Kamal Nath and Mr Anand
Sharma. Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman
of the Planning Commission and Mr Shyam Saran,
Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Climate Change, were
other top leaders of the team. An industry delegation,
led by Mr Venu Srinivasan, President, CII, accompanied
the ministers. Mr Azim Premji of Wipro was one of the
Co-Chairs of the Annual Meeting held between 26 -31
January.
The WEF Meeting 2010 was themed ‘Improve the State
of the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild’ and aimed at
deriving solutions for the economic challenges facing
the world. The CII delegation took forward the message
of Dr Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister, at the India
Economic Summit in November 2009, which focused on
rapid and inclusive growth as part of India’s strategy to
meet the expectations of a young, growing population
and pledged to push the reforms process forward. In
all, 42 sessions were addressed by 34 members of
the CII team.
The CII calendar of events at Davos 2010 included a
reception, three breakfast sessions on Asia’s role in
rebuilding the global economy, Innovation, and Indian
financial market reforms, respectively, the Bajaj Auto
Nightcap, and two evenings of Bollywood music. Each
of these events drew excellent and enthusiastic response
from Indian leaders as well as those interested in doing
business with India.
Mr Kamal Nath, Union Minister of Road Transport
and Highways, at the session on rebuilding critical
infrastructure, said that managing growth is India’s most
important challenge, as rapid growth has enlarged the
infrastructure deficit. Infrastructure is the most important
ingredient for inclusive growth, especially roads, he said,
pointing out that building 20 km of roads per day will
involve $50 billion in outlay.
A session on the world’s expectations from India and
its expectations from the world, televised by NDTV
22 | February 2010 Communiqué