The road ahead for Asia Nitin Gadkari, Union highways minister, Government of India N Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister, Andhra Pradesh
The first edition of the Hindustan Times– MintAsia Leadership Summit is scheduled to be held in Singapore on April 13. Singapore is the gateway to Asia and one of the world’s finance hubs. It is also an established hub for innovation and entrepreneurship.
India, home to around 17% of the world’s population, has made rapid strides in both areas. Both countries are representative parliamentary democracies. Both countries have a stake and a say in the future of Asia. The summit, with the theme of The Road Ahead for Asia, comes at a critical juncture in the evolution of Asia and the World. Asia, like the rest of the world, faces challenges related to security, growth, and inclusion. Countries around the world are becoming more inward looking and protectionist.
The World Trade Organization
Nitin Gadkari is credited with turning around the highways sector, which had hit a rough patch since 2007, after he became road transport and highways minister in 2014. A slew of policy initiatives, including facilitating developers by allowing a one-time infusion of funds to revive languishing projects and bringing in a new Public-Private Partnership model called “hybrid annuity,” helped his ministry build, on average, 20km of roads per day in the last two fiscal years. perhaps faces the greatest challenge to its relevance. China and the US have embarked on a trade war that could, apart from hurting the two countries, also change the contours of global trade. What does this mean for the Asian tigers, including Singapore? And what does this mean for India?
With participants drawn from the fields of politics, business, entertainment, business, and sport, the Hindustan Times-MintAsia Leadership Summit will address some of these issues, and more. These are issues relevant to India, Singapore, Asia, even the world.
Below are brief profiles of the participants:
Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu is one of the most seasoned politicians of South India. He is the longest serving CM in two stints — the first for nearly nine years between 1995 and 2004 in combined AP state and again from 2014 till date in the residuary state of AP. In his first stint, Naidu transformed Hyderabad into a global information technology destination by bringing Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp. to the city.