Former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan said a lot of Indian innovators now are going to Singapore or to Silicon Valley to set up because they find access to the final markets much easier there.

“We need to ask what is it that forces them to go outside of India to set up rather than stay inside India? But what is really heartwarming is talking to some of these entrepreneurs and seeing their desire to change the world. Increasingly many of them are not happy staying in India,” he said.

“They want to actually expand more globally. I think there is a young India that has a Virat Kohli mentality. I’m second to none in the world,” Rajan said.

Rajan was speaking at a conference on ‘Making India an Advanced Economy by 2047: What Will it Take at the George Washington University’.

Rajan said India was not reaping the benefits of democratic dividend, emphasizing that there is need to focus on improving the human capital and enhancing their skill sets. “That’s why I said 6 per cent growth. If you think that’s about what we are right now, take away the fluff in the GDP numbers. That 6 per cent is in the midst of a demographic dividend. It is much below where China and Korea were when they reaped their demographic dividend. And that’s why I’m saying we are being overly complicit when we say this is great. This is not because we are losing the demographic dividend because we are not giving those guys jobs,” the former RBI governor said.

Rajan endorsed the idea apprenticeship, whicb the Congress party has mentioned in its Lok Sabha 2024 manifesto. “I think there’s a lot that needs to be done to make it effective, but we need many more students to at least be capable of doing a good job,” Rajan said, adding that there also needs to be focus on job creation.

“We are going down in those areas. No wonder we have more of a job problem. The job problem was not created in the last 10 years. It’s been growing over the last few decades. But if you neglect the areas which are more intensive, I’m not saying we need to now offer subsidised subsidies to leather examples, but figure out what’s going wrong there and try and rectify that,” he said.

Earlier in his presentation, Rajan said regardless of whether one picks services, manufacturing, agricultural construction, India has a problem.

“Unemployment numbers are high, disguised unemployment is even higher, labor force participation is low, female labor force participation is really alarmingly low, the share of agriculture and jobs is increasing in recent times. Of course all this is exhibited in highly educated unemployment and massive numbers of people applying for government jobs. PhDs applying for jobs as peons in railways,” he said.