“Government Needs to Embrace the Private Sector and Help them Grow” – Hemang Jani, Secretary, Capacity Building Commission
Bangalore: At an IGF Annual Summit that took place in Bangalore to celebrate 75 years of independence and showcase the best of ‘New India Inc.’, renowned entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and senior government representatives assembled to discuss the growth of technology and drive change. A panel on Capacity building for ‘new India Inc.’ was held with Hemang Jani, Secretary, Capacity Building Commission, Government of India, Harsh Jain, CEO & Co-founder of Dream Sports and Dream11, Ashish Singhal Founder and CEO of CoinSwitch, Yashish Dahiya, Chairman & CEO, PB Fintech PolicyBazaar, and Jaimin Shah Co-Chair, ASSOCHAM Gujarat Council.
Hemang Jani began by emphasising technology being a delivery mechanism besides being an enabler. He said, “No government or civil servant can survive without the power of technology. Now, the big question is how we can create an enabling environment and an infrastructure so that the government and civil servants working with the startups and the industry can understand technology and appreciate the solutions that these startups and unicorns offer to the government.”
Hemang also added that the government is, in fact, responding with a short-term as well as a long-term plan. In the short term, the goal is to engage with Unicorns and to open the industry and embrace it, while the long-term goal is to teach all 3.1 million Indian civil servants and startup workers the importance of tech and artificial intelligence and train them into using it.
Harsh Jain, CEO and Co-founder, Dream11 & Dream Sports, appreciated the government’s willingness to commit time, energy and deeper understanding of new disruptive sectors, that is, sectors that have not been subject to prior regulation. Harsh said, “The Hon’ble Prime Minister and Finance Minister have expressed that gaming will hereafter be embraced and that India can become a gaming superpower. The Ministry of IT has further stated that gaming will be looked at as an intermediary act at the Centre rather than state levels. The Supreme Court has ruled Fantasy Sports to be a game of skill. Several academic studies have found it core to sports engagement. I am glad that we as a nation are moving away from banning the unknown and the private sector would love to work with the government to initiate appropriate regulations and provide more value to the exchequer, help with skilled labour, and much more. ”
“The Hon’ble Prime Minister’s vision of a 5 trillion economy and ease of living or ‘New India Inc’, as we call it, is going to be the most important building block going forward,” Hemang Jani added with enthusiasm while agreeing on the importance of a transformative, yet collaborative, approach towards introducing regulatory measures in upcoming new-age sectors.
In response to Yashish Dahiya’s statement about unlearning history to learn how to regulate a new sector and prepare for upcoming new challenges of the next decade, Hemang added, “Encouraging what the private sector has said, that’s how policies evolve when the sectors sit together and work together. How do you unlearn past things, and how do you make the government unlearn them and quickly learn new things? With technology, the government has to learn at the speed of light, and this is what we are looking at. Tech itself is going to help us in this. So I think working together with the private sector, learning from them, and embracing them is the way forward. Therefore regulation is required but it has to be predictive, it has to be collaborative, and it should provide a good environment for investors to invest and the country to prosper.”
Concluding the panel discussion, Jaimin Shah Co-Chair, ASSOCHAM Gujarat Council stressed on the importance of creating an environment that encourages investors to invest and help industries grow, “Traditionally we all know that government regulators are prescriptive as well as regulative, but now you can see that they’re very collaborative and outcome-based. The Indian government has adopted a sandbox type of approach lately. The kind of understanding where govt and new tech companies sit together to decide what kind of regulatory framework they can come up with, is ideal. Government directives make it clear that they want to understand new-age technology like startups and unicorns so as to be their partners rather than halt their growth. Collectively, they can come up with adequate regulations so that the interests of startups, the interest of citizens and the national interest are all taken care of.”
India Global Forum or IGF, is the agenda-setting forum for international business and global leaders, that aims to offer a selection of platforms for international corporates and policymakers to leverage and interact with stakeholders across sectors and geographies of strategic importance.