"21ST CENTURY WILL BE INDIA'S"?

Mumbai:--
As India`s growth story continues the 21st century will be India`s and demographically as the world grows older, the country is becoming younger and that will be its strength, Reliance Industries Limited Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said.
`In this decade and coming decades, India is becoming younger as the world becomes older,` Ambani said at the International Bar Association (IBA) Business Law Conference on India as an emerging economic giant in Mumbai.
`Fundamentally, the world is becoming older and India is becoming younger and that is our strength,` Ambani said.
Reeling out statistics, the Reliance Industries` Chairman said out of India`s one billion people, 44 per cent are less than 19 years of age.
`In the next 20 years, we will have more than 400 million under the age of 35 and in a decade from now, only 10 per cent of Indians will be above 60 years of age,` he said.
Ambani said there are four trends that would drive the world and India has a competitive advantage in them. `The first driver is demographics,` he said. India today represents in demographic terms exactly what the United States was in the 1910-1920s, he said.
The second trend is democracy and its pluralism and the ability of Indians to believe in that democracy.
`This is our baby-boomer generation that is growing up, that is aspiring, that produces and consumes at the same time and creates internal markets,` he said.
`The third trend that I see is again in India`s favour and I am a big believer in this.` As an engineer, he feels `that technology is going to drive more and more value-creation in the world and in spite of the recent economic meltdown, technology is not going to stop,` he said.
It would be technology that would pull the world out of recession, he said and added that relative to most other countries India has embraced technology better.
`The innovation and the knowledge-culture is nothing but competitive embracement of technology, where we just have a mindset, we have a gene pool where our young people can do very well in technology,` Ambani said.
He termed the last advantage as globalisation and growth.
`I think we have got an underlined growth momentum, and whatever happens to the rest of the world, we still think that we will grow at six to seven per cent,` Ambani said.
If one looked at the next three-four-five decades, India would maintain a double-digit growth and the economy had the growth momentum going for it for the next three decades, Ambani said, adding the country would also reinvent its growth model. ==msnnews==