Mind Vs Mindset : The Grand Indian Challenge

Summary

This Forum of Free Enterprise booklet reproduces Dr. R. A. Mashelkar’s address “Shaping Young Minds — Managing Career Expectations”, delivered in August 2008 under the joint auspices of the Lucknow Management Association and the All-India Management Association. Mashelkar, then Chairman of the Governing Council of the National Innovation Foundation and a former Director General of the CSIR, frames India’s twenty-first-century challenge as one of “mind versus mindset”: the Indian mind has never wanted for intellect — it produced the zero and now lays the foundation of the digital economy — but the Indian mindset, captured in the proverb that two Indians together “neutralize each other”, routinely strips that intellect of its multiplier effect. The argument is that demography, democracy and diversity give India structural advantages over China only if institutional and national mindsets are deliberately rebuilt.

Mashelkar develops the thesis autobiographically. He tells the story of his rise from an SSC examinee living in Chowpatty on a Tata trust scholarship to Director of the National Chemical Laboratory (1989–1995), where, instead of doing reverse engineering for Indian firms, NCL filed a US patent for a solid-state polycondensation route to polycarbonates and forced General Electric into a knowledge-partnership. The personal narrative carries the institutional message: NCL’s mindset shifted from “publish or perish” to “patent, publish and prosper”, from reaching the limits of excellence to exceeding them, and from being intermediaries in a domestic market to selling globally. The 1991 liberalisation is treated as a “second freedom” — the parallel case of Tata Motors being permitted to build the Indica (and therefore the Nano) is offered as evidence that the same engineers, freed of the licence-permit mindset, become world-class.

The closing sections pivot to a programme for the country. India’s three structural Ds — Democracy, Demography and Diversity — must be matched by three Ts — Talent, Technology and Tolerance. Talent is in evidence (Olympics of the Mind, TCS’s CBFL functional-literacy software, Medak’s literacy gains); technology, especially IT and inclusive science, can lift the bottom of the pyramid; tolerance — of risk, of failure, and crucially of ambiguity — is the missing Silicon Valley ingredient. He insists growth must be “inclusive growth” rooted in innovation that reaches the excluded, citing the National Innovation Foundation’s Shodha Yatras and grass-roots innovators such as the eighth-standard dropout schoolboy who built a robot. Mashelkar closes by invoking the Hanuman who learned his powers only when Jambawant reminded him of them: India’s 1.2 billion potential Hanumans, he argues, must be told what they can do.

The booklet is introduced by Minoo R. Shroff, President of the Forum of Free Enterprise, and is dedicated to the late Shailesh Kapadia (1949–1988) with sponsorship by the Shailesh Kapadia Memorial Trust.

Key points

• Mashelkar distinguishes mind (intellect, analysis, synthesis) from mindset (attitude, approach), arguing India’s grand challenge is the latter, not the former.

• He retells his career — Chowpatty boyhood, Sir Dorab Tata Trust scholarship, NCL directorship, FRS — as a parable of how an individual ladder of excellence becomes “limitless” only when the mindset changes.

• NCL’s solid-state polycondensation patent and its R&D partnership with General Electric (Jack Welch) are presented as the institutional inflection from reverse engineering to “forward engineering”.

• 1991 economic liberalisation is framed as India’s “second freedom”: the same Tata engineers built the Indica and Nano only after the licensing regime was lifted.

• Against China’s authoritarian model, India’s competitive advantages are the three Ds — Democracy, Demography (over half the population under 25) and Diversity — but only if managed as “unity in diversity”.

• The prescription for the twenty-first century is the three Ts — Talent, Technology and Tolerance (especially tolerance of failure and ambiguity, the missing Silicon Valley element).

• Growth must be inclusive: innovation has to reach the bottom of the pyramid, exemplified by TCS’s CBFL adult-literacy software, Medak’s literacy turnaround and the National Innovation Foundation’s Shodha Yatras.

• The booklet is a Shailesh Kapadia Memorial Trust-sponsored Forum of Free Enterprise reprint of an address delivered on 9 August 2008, issued on 5 October 2010 with an introduction by Minoo R. Shroff.