Cultivating trust can unlock India’s growth potential

Says Prof Tarun Khanna, Harvard Professor, at the Distinguished Global Indian Speaker Series at Amity University Haryana  

Cultivating trust can unlock India’s growth potential

Gurugram: 
Amity University Haryana organized its 13th Session of prestigious “Distinguished Global Indian Speaker Series (DGISS)” by felicitating today Prof. (Dr.) Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School, Director, Lakshmi Mittal & Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University, USA in the august presence of Vice Chancellors, Deans and Heads of Institutions of Amity Universities in India and campuses abroad. 

Following the vision of our honorable Chancellor Dr. Aseem Chauhan on augmenting internationalization, Distinguished Global Indian Speaker Series is a highly successful endeavor by Amity University Haryana to invite and honor accomplished academicians and researchers from premier foreign institutions across the globe intended to provide a rich international and comparative academic experience to its faculty and students.

Nominee of a Young Global Leader (under 40) in the past by the World Economic Forum, Prof Tarun Khanna delivered a highly informative and inspiring webinar on “Cultivating Trust Can Unlock India’s Potential”. He was felicitated by Amity University with the ceremonial citation for recognizing his achievements and contributions in his field of his expertise.

While delivering his welcome address Vice Chancellor of AUH, Prof P B Sharma emphasized the need for creating a scientific mindset embedded with enterprising spirit to unleash enormous potential of mass-entrepreneurship in India. Prof Sharma also added that Technology, Transparency and Trust are the three Ts that go together in the present age of digital transformation and hence to cultivate trust increasing use of technology would be highly beneficial. He proudly mentioned that how founders of Amity University have cultivated trust in our organization that is consistently driving us towards excellence.

In his keynote presentation Prof. Tarun Khanna described in great details about how investing in trust is beneficial and the four important points for the entrepreneurship i.e Food, Dignity, Talent and Ideas. 

“Entrepreneurs with great ideas in developing countries need to evolve frameworks of trust which would create positive societal impacts and bring commercial benefits as well. He cited case studies of “Wondermilk” in China, “BRAC” in Bangladesh and elaborated how startups got successful by developing an ecosystem of trust around their commercial operations. He also talked about how start-up firms like Aspiring Minds harvested the need of sound trustworthy ecosystem as a business opportunity which worked creatively to match talent with job requirements using most modern tech and AI tools.Professor Khanna also touched upon the need to eliminate mistrust between scientists and entrepreneurs so that a free flowing collaboration could happen to bring societal benefits. We should work on unlocking scientific potential to allow free flow of ideas to generate creative solutions to the societal problems,” added Prof Khanna. 

The session was moderated by Prof. (Dr) Gunjan M Sanjeev, Vice President-RBEF (Amity Group) and Director- International Affairs. She emphasized on how issues brought out in the session were relevant to other emerging nations also as the ecosystem broadly remains the same across such countries.”Internationalization of higher education is an integral agenda at AUH and the entire Faculty fraternity and student community would definitely benefit from the expertise and perspectives of distinguished academicians brought out at such prestigious forums from different parts of the world.

The occasion also celebrated the of publication of the book “Trust” authored by Prof. Tarun Khanna in which budding entrepreneurs from different emerging economies- Bhutan , India , Nepal , Sierra Leone amongst others shared their stories on how this book helped them in their entrepreneurial journey and improved their business prospects and how this book is a must for all entrepreneurs.

In the question and answer session Dr Khanna answered a number of questions from the participants relating to the role of the educational institutions in creating the vital mindset ship for cultivating trust, role of government policies and regulations and participation of people in creating the ecosystem for cultivating trust.

Several senior officials actively participated in the discussion these included Prof (Dr) Gurinder Singh, Group Vice Chancellor- Amity University, Dr AK Nagpal, Chairman Amity Board of Medical Sciences, Lt Gen VK Sharma, Vice Chancellor of Amity University Gwalior, Prof Amit Jain, PVC - AUR, Prof M P Kaushik, PVC - AUMP, Dr Sunil Dhaneshwar, PVC – AUUP Lucknow, Dr Ranjan Kr Jha Vice Chancellor Amity University Ranchi, Maj Gen B S Suhag (Retd), Deputy Vice Chancellor -AUH, Prof Padmakali Banerjee, Pro Vice Chancellor, Dr. Ravi Manuja, Registrar, Dr Vikas Madhukar, Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor, Dr Rajendra Prasad, Dean and Director- AIB, Maj Gen P K Sharma (Retd.), Director- ALS, Prof U N Singh, Dean – Liberal Arts and Rear Admiral KK Pandey, Director HR. and over 1500 participants who registered for the webinar and several hundreds more who watched it live as well.