We gather here today to celebrate the distance that we have travelled together and to take stock of the road ahead. The India growth story, if I might describe it as a symphony of enterprise – as for the conductor of the great Indian orchestra is none other than our Hon’ble Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. Each of the multitudinous artistes who have contributed their notes deserves our applause, but the loudest applause must indeed go to the Prime Minister himself. People may notice a discordant note or two; but these sessions of music making are but in preparation for the big events yet to come.

Last year we launched the voluntary guidelines for corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. In a few months those guidelines have become a role model for a vast number of corporate as well as the focal point of discussions not just in India but all over the world. We have engaged stakeholders and the voluntary sector to respond to the efficacy and format of the voluntary guidelines and, after considerable efforts through the good offices of the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, have arrived at the latest draft version of the voluntary guidelines, which will soon be placed on their website for even wider consultation with the stakeholder constituency.

Essentially these steps are being taken to gather willing partners with the Government in an enlightened enterprise of equitable growth. When people speak of there being two Indias, we respond with determination to bridge those two Indias into a wholesome unity of purpose, endeavor and accomplishment. Soon India will have a state of the art, people friendly Companies Act and several significant platforms such as the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs in its brand new campus at Manesar, to become a focal point for people, who reflect upon corporate governance and its related fields, to gather and exchange the ideas. In the process we hope to imprint on universal models the special Indian dimension nurtured in the soil of Indian ethos. Sustainability has many dimensions. Two significant symbolic steps being voluntary taken by Corporate India and actively supported by Government include what I call the ‘Call of the Corporate Tiger’. Even as our Look East policy helps us engage with the economies of Asian tigers, we are committing ourselves to the survival and preservation of the Bengal tiger that represents our ecosystem in a remarkable way. Similarly, the effort of Corporate India to reach out to ex-servicemen, veterans and families of martyrs who laid down their lives in the defence of the country is once again both a symbolic and substantive effort to make sustainability of business a high priority in the widest sense of the word and to give India a new corporate culture that will be the cutting edge of India’s role in the world in the 21st century. The Hon’ble Prime Minister’s blessings to the engineering of new corporate culture gives us strength and greater determination. We take the road conscious of our destiny and with the famous words of the poet ringing in our ears that it is only the brave riders who fall from their horse, for children who crawl can hardly get unseated. We expect to ride with conviction and determination and will rise beyond every pitfall for the glory of our country and growth of our economy.

Thank you.