Andhra Industry Minister M Goutham Reddy kickstarts partnership with Indian School of Business (ISB)

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An Advisory Council on Development of Andhra Pradesh to be formed with ISB as the Nodal Agency. M Goutham Reddy, Minister for Industries, IT and Skills, Government of Andhra Pradesh visited the Indian School of Business at Hyderabad today and interacted with key professors to discuss upon strategies to revive economic growth in the state and come up with a long term roadmap for sustainable development in the State through data-driven policy making.

Speaking at the meeting Minister expressed his keenness to see a seamless functioning of various departments towards development and urged ISB to come up with a governance model to create a synchronous functioning of departments of development.

Minister also expressed to work together on creating jobs where the labour is, creating quality management structure in government, skill gaps among others. “It is important to strategize a model for synchronous functioning which will be used as a test model for a seamless and transparent governance”, he said.

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The Industries Minister also mentioned that an Advisory Council on Development of Andhra Pradesh will be formed with ISB as a Nodal Agency. The key areas of engagement identified to be taken up as ‘project mode’ are:

Synchronous functioning of departments of development: The objective of the proposed project is to see a greater synergy between departments to address the larger issues of development. The need is to study the entire value chain of development from a horizontal perspective. This could be looked from the perspective of Organizational Behaviour and integrative public policies of development.

Andhra Pradesh Pulse: In order to help governance reach the last mile, Pulse is a an advanced data analytics application using near real-time digital data on citizen interactions with government schemes and systems. The process integrates continuous data streams into a common framework for analytics and will be designed to detect anomalies that signify potential challenges at an aggregate spatial level (such as the panchayat). The project will provide dashboards for ground level actionable intelligence on potential exclusion and establish advance warning mechanisms.

Attracting investments: Every state is offering a suite of incentives to attract investments in industrial development, often customized to local endowments. We will undertake a comparative analysis of incentives and investment patterns across states. This will allow Andhra Pradesh to learn from experience across India and structure incentives to make the state more attractive for targeted investment. This analysis will include an evaluation of the performance of the state in comparison to its peers, identification of relative strengths and comparative advantage, description of major bottlenecks and obstacles to investment in specific sectors, and recommendations for policy actions that align growth opportunities with resource endowments.

Matching Skills to Jobs: With a few million returning migrants, several states in India are struggling to implement relief measures to alleviate distress in the immediate short term. However, these returning migrants are often skilled workers who can be deployed productively in local jobs requiring similar or adjacent skills, which will also contribute to local economic recovery. ISB would like to contribute towards building a system to record the skill sets of returning migrants in order to assess the gap between skills and available jobs in post-pandemic times. This will also help the government design public investments to maximize employment opportunities for returning migrant populations. Over time, the system will be able to address the skills gap effectively, and help in attracting investments based on availability of local skilled workers.

Speaking at the meeting Professor Ashwini Chhatre, Associate Professor of Public Policy, ISB said: “ISB Faculty and students are delighted to collaborate with Government of Andhra Pradesh on the agenda of inclusive and sustainable development through the [email protected] initiative. We applaud the spirit of openness and collaboration, and pledge to support the Government of Andhra Pradesh to the fullest extent possible”.

Participants:

1. Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry, Professor of Finance and Executive Director, Digital Identity and Research Initiative (DIRI), ISB
2. Professor Chandrashekhar Sripada, Clinical Professor – OB and Strategic Human Capital, ISB
3. Professor Ashwini Chhatre, Professor of Public Policy, ISB
4. Shri DNV Kumara Guru, Director External Relations, ISB
5. Shri Sundeep Jammalamada, Associate Director, ISB
6. Dr Sridhar Bhagavatula, Senior Manager, ISB

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