Creative leaders needed for developed India beyond 2020: Kalam

"A creative leader is one who has a vision, a passion to transform that vision into action. He or she should be able to travel the unexplored path, know how to manage success and failure, have courage to take decisions, have nobility in management and every action of the leaders should be transparent.

"A crucial aspect of leadership in the 21st century is that a leader should work with integrity," said he.

Kalam was delivering the annual Penguin lecture--"Beyond 2020: Sustained Development Missions For the Nation"--here late last evening during which he outlined his beliefs on the the need for sustainable development of nations and visualised India as an economically developed nation by the year 2020.

The former President detailed that the sustainable development profile of the nation primarily depended on three things, first of which was "a steady economic growth of 9 per cent with minimum variations of 1.5 to 2 per cent."

"Secondly, the job profile of the future is a function of technological nature of business and market operations for sustainaiblity that provides continuous income and growth assurance in such a situation," said Kalam.

"Next is giving back to the environment. For millions of years humanity has always been taking resources without giving anything back to the planet. Time has come to take less and less from nature to achieve sustainability... It will lead to well-being of the people and continuous growth," he said.

The rocket scientist, who is also the father of India's missile development programme, explained that systems like Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA), on which he had been working since 2003 could act as "enablers" and bring about inclusive growth and integrated development to the nations of the world and especially to the 700 million people who live in the 600,000 villages in India.

"Today PURA system has graduated to a unique system of sustainable development across the world. The vision is creating a sustainable development system through the creation of three connectivities namely physical connectivity, knowledge connectivity and electronic connectivity leading to the economic connectivity," he said.

As chairman of the Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), Kalam had presented a document on technology vision 2020 as blueprint to make India into a developed country.

Last evening, he introduced a new model--"user community pyramid which uses a convergence of technology to bring development to people using natural resources optimally for generations to come." (More)