The MindMine Summit 2015 Ends Today
The MindMine Summit’s ninth edition that began yesterday saw an amazing start and informative end to it this year. The second day of the summit touched upon wide variety of topics like- Can Indian Companies Build Iconic Global Brands?, Would E-commerce take over the retail market?, How government can work towards making the disabled as an asset to the country? And other such sessions. There were around 65 panellists in this two days summit and more than 300 delegates participated, coming from different walks of life.
The interest developed when the session about e-commerce started wherein esteemed panellists Kunal Bahl (Founder & CEO, Snapdeal), Sunil Kaushal (CEO, Standard Chartered Bank), Arvind Singhal (Chairman, Technopak) and Rajat Wahi (Partner, Consumer and Retail, KPMG India) spoke about the sudden growth in the usage of Internet services and how e-commerce might take up larger part of the buying-selling market but retail would not just vanish since even now there is a large number of audience which prefers retail market. Wherein e-commerce has always been thought as a building challenge to retailers, Kunal Bahl negates the assumptions because for him it is an easy platform to build a connection between consumers and retailers, and the market has every sort of audience with different need. Adding to him Arvind Singhal said that the people who are shifting to e-commerce are mostly urban and the rural population haven’t been able to get on to internet yet, however, the times are not far when the internet would spread its wings to a larger section of the population.
Net Neutrality, which seems to have become a big concern amongst the youth especially over every social media, got attention in the summit as well. Former Minister of Information and Broadcast, Manish Tiwari said that he was just struck by the relationship which was sought to be established between regulation and Internet. And for him, internet is probably the best development of this decade and never before in the history of mankind it has happened that so much power was observed on the tip of the finger. However, he agreed to the fact that the government is trying to put in rules and regulations of physical world into virtual world and that can pose a very big challenge for the internet users. He said that internet empowers the citizen to make environment demand driven rather than supply driven. However, he says that we all really have to think how to use this medium to make us the first world country.
Suman Bose, Managing Director, Siemens PLM software India, said that people spend 42% of their time on mobile and the second largest on the television and soon there would be a day when people will start solar mobiles. After giving out his opinion on Net Neutrality, he added Internet would accelerate the growth of our society.
The session also pointed out the need to impart skill to the differently abled people to enable them to be part of the society as contributors. However, it is sad that disability and differently abled people are highly under reported. Nipun Malhotra, Disability Rights Activist, spoke about how they need to be given opportunity and not be pitied or give charity to.
He further spoke that the need is to analyse the disability and recognise their potential in spite of their disability. Somehow, people are so obsessed by disability that they stop taking them as humans. It was also argued that though whatever government has been doing is appreciated, a lot more has to be done even now and it’s high time for the corporate sector to take part in the cause.
So, overall the second or the last day of the summit was inspiring, informative and quite involving. Where it has left unanswered questions, definitely a lot of excitement has popped up amongst people to look out for the changes. However, we all have to wait to know the ground level changes or amendments till the next MindMine Summit.
