HYDERABAD, 6 December 2006 — Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday called for improving logistics and investing in the capabilities of people to “uplift millions and millions of citizens from subsistence living into the 21st century.”

Inaugurating the global logistics summit at the Indian School of Business (ISB) here, he said that with the global market opening up for India there was need to have logistics in place to take advantage of the opportunities.

“Logistics can play a key role in integrating rural and urban India, contributing to employment creation and income generation,” the prime minister said.

He also called for investments in rural infrastructure to tap the vast potential rural India offered, adding that the Bharat Nirman program of the government was aimed at achieving this goal.

Manmohan Singh said rural business hubs would get greater attention in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2007-12).

“We have to enable an agrarian transformation that will uplift millions and millions of our citizens from subsistence living into the 21st century. This, I recognize, is a heroic challenge facing administrators and managers in India today,” he said.

“The transformation of Indian agriculture and rural India, I believe, will be the greatest development saga of the next quarter century. We have to think big and think anew, retaining inherited wisdom and building a new edifice of creative thinking on it.” Manmohan Singh said India had a unique paradox in the world as agriculture contributes only 20 percent to the economy but 75 percent of the country’s population depends on it for livelihood.

He stressed the need to evolve an Indian approach to management education.

“Even as we learn from the West and the East, we must try and evolve our own paradigm of management education based on our own social and cultural attributes.”

“After all, one of the guiding principles of modern management is — ‘think global, act local’. To be able to act local it is necessary to be familiar with the local.

“We need to have a logistics model that reaches out to the potential in rural India. A model, which delivers goods and services there in a cost-effective manner, a model, which provides cost-effective access for rural produce to our urban, industrial markets,” the prime minister said.

“The production, financing, marketing and logistics possibilities of rural India will require new, innovative approaches, new tools of analysis and new solutions. This is the challenge for business schools and researchers,” he said.

The two-day event with the theme “Logistics for global competitive advantage and rural growth” will explore the challenges and opportunities of rural India as well as global supply chain networks in the country.

It is being attended by leading industrialists, academicians and senior government officials.

Sunil Munjal, chairman, Hero Corporation, said the countries that lack logistics lose competitiveness and run out of steam. He pointed out that the per capita income in rural areas was less than 30 percent of the national average.

Munjal outlined the initiatives launched by Hero Mindmine Institute and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to set up rural business hubs with public-private and panchayat (village council) partnership and pointed out that 50 agreements had already been signed in this regard and 100 more were in the pipeline.

Andhra Pradesh Governor Rameswar Thakur, Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, ISB Chairman Rajat Gupta also addressed the inaugural ceremony.