There is a new buzz about India in the international business community. It is rapidly emerging as a preferred destination for foreign investors. FII inflows have reached a new high by crossing the $10 billion mark in 2005. FDI, too, has been one of the highest in recent years, with an inflow of $2.9 billion (April-September 2005). India is considered as one of the fastest growing economies of the world. The stock market shows no sign of stopping as it reaches new heights. A consumer boom is upon us as corporates clock in respectable profits. Property prices are going through the roof. On all counts, we seemed to have got the world's attention and the economy is doing well on most parameters.

But all this good news sometimes masks some of our hard realities and a deeper malaise. Our infrastructure deficit is gigantic. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has gone on record that the country needs to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years to get its infrastructure up to acceptable levels. Indian companies pay thrice as much for power as their competitors in China, yet suffer more outages. About 150 million Indian households do not have electricity. Some 100 million families live without water at home. According to an estimate by the Confederation of Indian Industry, it is cheaper to import steel from Europe to Mumbai than to transport it from Jamshedpur. The country's literacy rate is an unimpressive 61 per cent and probably that high because it is near total in large cities. And the benefits of the telecommunication and computing revolution that has taken urban India by storm over the past five years is all but lost to almost 80 per cent of the country's 1.2 billion people.

There are other such statistics, most of which serve only to dispel the notion that India is on the way to becoming the economic, intellectual and cultural powerhouse that we all believe it is. At the level of the household-economy, for instance, only around nine out of every 1,000 Indians drive, or are driven around, in a car. At the intellectual plane, only four Indians have ever won Nobel Prizes. In the area of culture, no Indian film has ever won an Oscar (and this in a country that churns out 1,200 motion pictures a year). And no Indian has ever won an Olympic Gold.

In other words, India is one Big challenge. But these challenges can be met. It may take some doing to pipe electricity to all of India's villages, but it is possible to do so. Which is why this anniversary issue of Business Today, the 14th in a series of anniversary issues, is dedicated to the theme of understanding what it will take to achieve every one of these objectives: from an Olympic Gold to universal healthcare; from a Physics Nobel to cars for all; and from an Oscar to a teledensity of 100. Over the next 200 pages or so, some of the finest Indian minds in the world will set out their own blueprint for achieving these goals that were once considered impossible.

It is heartening that most of these visionaries are from the world of business. It has always been my belief that Big Business will eventually get around to addressing some of humanity's seemingly insurmountable problems. Charity isn't a sound business model, but development is. And in this, the 21st century, profit no longer comes with innuendos of exploitation. Some of the suggestions you will encounter in these pages are radical. Others are delightfully simple. It is our hope that reading them will encourage you to come up with solutions of your own for such, or other problems.

Here's wishing you a happy, prosperous and productive new year. May the good times roll for all.

Aroon Purie