Experts discuss aggregation problem,
inequality risks, and pathways in building
India’s institutional resilience.
Institutions must become anticipatory rather
than being merely responsive…
Ashvin Parekh
Managing Partner, Ashvin Parekh Advisory Services
LLP | Independent Director, Grasim Industries,
Aditya Birla Sun Life Insurance & ICICI Securities
To understand where India stands today, it helps to study the last 100 years of development across Europe, the US, and Asia through the lens of demographic premium. Europe had a tremendous demographic advantage in the 1930s — young populations, the industrial revolution in full swing. Germany, Spain, Italy became wealthy nations. And then they wasted that premium on World War I and World War II. Japan learned a bitter lesson from that experience and used its own demographic advantage with strategic intelligence — channeling semiconductor technology into automobiles and consumer electronics, fuelling a remarkable industrial rise. Then came China in the 1990s and 2000s, deploying its young workforce with clear direction, high-value jobs, and a manufacturing-led growth model. China used its demographic advantage to the fullest possible extent.
Now it is India’s story. Our demographic advantage still has 15 to 20 years to run. But to realise it we need three things: political stability, institutional investment, and genuine popular support. My thinking here draws on Alvin Toffler, who in 1970 described not just change but the speed with which change would hit us — a future shock that would be chaotic and upon nations to navigate. India today lives in three waves simultaneously. On the same road a Mercedes and a bullock cart have equal right of way. We have AI-led enterprises coexisting with agrarian communities. We are a presumer economy — we produce and consume. That is a source of strength, but it also means the speed of change is the main stressor.
The semiconductor story is instructive. India missed the first wave of chip technology. China got there through three engineers who carried knowledge from the US back home, backed by a government that supported their ideas. Now India has started moving, with state-industry compacts alongside Taiwanese manufacturers and a policy push to bring back talent from the diaspora. Brain gain must replace brain drain. AI governance infrastructure — the DPDP Act, India AI Mission — is being built, but algorithm accountability, compute infrastructure, and cybersecurity still lag. The imperative for institutions is clear: become anticipatory rather than merely responsive, treat technology as strategic infrastructure, and invest relentlessly in reskilling people. As my Sri Lanka experience showed, when 70 percent of workers who took voluntary retirement later reskilled themselves and returned to banking, age is not a barrier. People can change, given the right environment and the right incentive.
We need to cultivate epistemic resilience…
Dr M. Vijayabaskar
Professor, MIDS, Chennai | Member, State Planning
Commission, Government of Tamil Nadu
I want to flag two dimensions that I believe seriously undermine resilience, and then point to two pathways through which we can address them. The first is what I call the aggregation problem. At the individual level, rational decisions aggregate into collective fragility. We use air conditioning because we want comfort — but in Chennai only 5 percent of households have it, and as that number rises the heat stress on everyone else rises too. An individual firm cuts costs to maximise shareholder value — sensible in isolation — but when that means under-investing in workforce capability, eliminating productive redundancy, and suppressing the wage base, it erodes the very demand that drives the economy. Nations act in narrow self-interest, delaying emission cuts — rational for each, catastrophic in aggregate. The fundamental question is how we ensure that what we do at the individual, firm, and national level aligns with resilience at the global level.
The second dimension is growing inequality within countries — not only India but globally. Inequality concentrates adaptive capacity at the top, leaving a large and vulnerable majority exposed to climate risk, biodiversity loss, and economic disruption. It also prevents collective response. When people at the bottom of the social ladder feel that rules are not made for them, they do not follow them. The sense of shared security frays. Elites exit into gated communities. The whole social contract weakens.
Two pathways matter here. The first is fraternity and social coherence. Cohesion can be enforced by government to a degree, but fraternity is built from the bottom up — it introduces the element of moral obligation, which is not legally enforceable but shapes how we act and relate to one another. Layered solidarities — feeling Tamilian, Indian, and simultaneously a global citizen — are the architecture we need. The second pathway is education, but not education understood merely as human capital building. We need to cultivate epistemic resilience — knowing how to learn; social-relational resilience — learning how to learn together; and moral imagination — the recognition that we are interdependent and answerable to one another across national borders. And we must normalise failure as a pathway to learning, not as a source of shame. As we started with Nelson Mandela’s words, so I will end with them: resilience is not the absence of being hit — it is the act of rising again.
There is a bit of Hiroo Onoda in each one of us.
R Gopalakrishnan
Author & Former Executive Director | Tata Sons Ltd
My friend Ashvin cited Alvin Toffler on the accelerating pace of change. I have a different view. Change has been accelerating for 200 to 300 years. My grandfather told me in the 1950s that when he was a child, a big black monster puffing smoke arrived at Manarkudi railway station and took you to Madras in 8 hours — whereas before, a bullock cart took 8 days. He said, the pace of change is alarming, I don’t know how you people will survive. My father told me the same thing. I have told my son the same thing. My son is telling his grandson the same thing. The tools to cope with change are also rising exponentially. The gap is constant. So do not let rate-of-change anxiety paralyse you.
What I do agree with completely is Professor Vijayabaskar’s insight about the micro affecting the macro. The problem of resilience can be better understood if you cellularize organisations rather than aggregate them into matrices. And here biology teaches us more than we credit it. The human body is the most resilient system I know. It is comprised of billions of cells, each autonomous. There is no deputy general manager or vice president. The cells self-coordinate. Even as I speak, cells in your body are dying and new ones are forming. You are not conscious of it. Change is relative. This planet moves at 25,000 miles per hour and you do not feel it. The lesson: the human species has increased its longevity dramatically through two mechanisms — disease reduction through hygiene and vaccination, and anticipation through continuous learning. Can you run a company the same way?
Let me close with two stories. Hiroo Onoda was airdropped onto Lubang Island in the Philippines in 1942 and instructed to survive in the forest and shoot any white man he encountered. He kept doing exactly that until 1972 — 27 years after the war ended — because nobody told him the war was over. He was following the training given to him as a management trainee. There is a bit of Hiroo Onoda in each one of us. Second story: the Choluteca bridge in Honduras. The government commissioned the Japanese to build a bridge that would stand 100 years. A hurricane came one year later. The bridge was intact. But the river had changed its course. That bridge stands today, bridging nothing — not because it collapsed, but because the reality it was designed for no longer exists. These two stories caution against a purely mechanical response to AI and disruption. Never give up your natural intelligence. Stay alert to the possibility that the river has moved. The organisation that keeps its leaders in genuine contact with its most vulnerable people — not as a PR exercise but as a genetic disposition of humane leadership — is the organisation that will endure.
Q&A
Boards play a critical role in resilience. How must board governance evolve in an era of AI risk, data vulnerabilities, and geopolitical uncertainties?
Boards are not industry specialists — they may have one specialism, whether accounting, law, or technology — but their distinctive role is to bring natural intelligence to questions the CEO is sometimes too driven to ask. Having served on 25 boards over 37 years, I can say that the most effective boards are those that stand back from the numbers and ask the right questions. If a board checks every line of the audit statement and nothing else, it has failed. Strategy is the common thread that binds all board members: what business are we in, how long will it remain viable, what disruptions are coming, and are we prepared for them? The board member who treats every quarterly meeting as a post-mortem is no longer adequate. The board must actively push the change it wants to see in management — in a structured and proper manner, but it must push.
Technological disruption often creates uneven outcomes. How can institutions balance efficiency with inclusion while maintaining trust?
We sometimes speak of technology as if it has an autonomous will of its own and we are merely responding to it. But historically technologies have always been socially driven and institutionally shaped. Agricultural technology in Japan evolved to respect scarce land and abundant labour; in the US it did the opposite. Both delivered efficiency, but through entirely different trajectories. Once we recognise that technologies respond to the resource endowments and institutional choices of societies, we can ask: given our own endowments, what technologies are likely to work for us? And where technology is already displacing workers, what interventions can minimise disruption and ensure that opportunity is opened up across the board? The answer lies in ensuring that the supply side is genuinely inclusive — that access to learning, to reskilling, and to participation in new economic activity is not concentrated only at the top.
