Designing Solutions Key to Improved Productivity

Mumbai: Planning Commission member Arun Maira said the government intends to set up several design institutes across the country.

Maira was speaking at the second CII Global Strategic Design Summit 2013 organised by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

"Money invested in public expenditure is not giving desired results due to flaws in design. Designing solutions with engagement of implementation agencies is the key for the future," Maira said.

He also said that there is a flaw in governance in our country and called for the need of public participation to ensure that governance architecture must be much more local than centralised.

Maira said there is a lack of coordination within ministries to support overlapping schemes within the government. India is doing worse than Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa in terms of malnutrition, despite spending a lot of money, he added.

"Malnutrition is not only about giving good food but also about sanitation, clean and safe water and women's empowerment. All these programmes are with different ministries and hence the need to design governance architecture," he said.

Also present at the summit were Adviser to the Prime Minister on Public Information, Infrastructure and Innovations Sam Pitroda; chairman and managing director, Godrej and Boyce Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Jamshyd N. Godrej, and CII director general Chandrajit Banerjee.

Pitroda said that innovation in government is as important as innovation in laboratories. "We need to improve innovation eco-system in our country. The problem is that our innovation goes into the solving of the problems of the rich. However, it is the problem of poor, which does not get the right kind of resources," he said.

Godrej spoke about the need to introduce new initiatives. "We have introduced a new initiative on design thinking in partnership with the IIT Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, U.S., to bring about the required mind-set change in the way we approach problems in a company level and at a country level," he said.
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