'Prahalad would have helped India overcome the present impasse'

Chennai: "There is a need to ensure that India's half-finished economic reforms do not turn out to be half baked. Freeing markets for products is not sufficient. The reforms needed with regard to land, power, labour and capital will need a Prahaladian approach," says West Bengal Governor M K Narayanan.

Speaking during the opening of the 'Professor C K Prahalad Centre for Emerging India' at the Loyola Institute of Business Administration in Chennai on Saturday, the former national security advisor said that the hope that India's democratic and demographic dividend of elected accountability and a large young population being India’s USP against countries like China might not come true.

There is a need for more reforms and a battle of ideas to be won, he added.

Paying tributes to the late management guru, Narayanan said Prahalad’s innovative thinking and remarkable sagacity would have helped India find ways and means to overcome the present impasse.

“He had in him a quality generally attributed to great scientists and philosophers – to think beyond the ordinary and develop insights which few others had,” Narayanan said.

Speaking on the occasion, Infosys chairman K V Kamath said Prahalad had advised the Indian companies, which were facing many challenges in the post liberalization era in the 1990s, to turn multinational companies to face competitions. In less than a decade later, the country witnessed many Indian companies becoming MNCs and reaping profits, Kamath said.

Paying an emotional tribute to her husband, Gayatri Prahalad said eradicating poverty was his main concern. She said Prahalad believed that academia was the only field where one could mould young minds.

He had believed that what mattered was excellence in the chosen field. He had advised students not to choose career just for money, she recalled.

Fr N Casimir Raj, director of Professor C K Prahalad Centre for Emerging India, said Prahalad’s premise that business models can mobilise socio-economic change by engaging the poor in the marketplace profitably is the inspiration behind the centre.

He said the centre would undertake research in the areas of strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship in sync with the Prahaladian concepts.

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