Good morning everyone. Mr. Amitab Kant, former G20 sherpa for India, former CEO Niti Aayog and senior adviser Fairfax SMBC and Warburg Pincus. Mr. Vishal Kani, senior vice president IMA and vice chairman and managing director JM Financial. Mr. Vinit Agarwal, Vice President IMA and managing director Transport Corporation of India. Mr. Shriya Seti, our director general, past presidents, members of the IMA Council, IMA members, distinguished speakers, members of the media and delegates, ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to all of you to the National Management Convention 2026.
Mr. Kant, thank you so much for joining us in this opening session and as Reika said, you've been a big supporter of IMA and thank you for doing that over the years. Few people have spent as much time as you have thinking about how India competes in the world and so there would not have been a better person to open a conversation on resilience and competitiveness and thank you once again for joining us.
This is the third major IMA gathering in the year after our foundation day and the national leadership conclave. And through these conversations, we have kept coming back to a theme that I think has become relevant with every passing month, growth with resilience. Because of the uncertainty that has become even more visible.
There has probably never been a time when the world has been more interested in India as a market, as a manufacturing base, as a source of technology and talent, and increasingly as a strategic partner. There's probably also never been a time when it has been harder to predict what the global environment is going to look like in a few years from now. And these two things are connected. The world is changing and that change is creating an opportunity for India. But whether we are able to capture that opportunity will depend on how capable and competitive we become.
You can see this change happening around us. Even recently we had a BRICS summit here in New Delhi. If you look at what the BRICS is discussing today, it tells you something about the direction in which the global economy is moving. There is a lot of focus on trade, investment, technology, energy, supply chains and greater participation of emerging economies in global value chains, especially in the light of global tariffs and trade restrictions. And this is happening against a backdrop where the global trading system is becoming even more contested. While globalization will not go away, the way in which companies and countries participate in it is changing. We are becoming more conscious of the risks that may not have been central to business thinking in the past.
The terrible events that we've seen recently in Nepal are a painful reminder of that. The loss of life and the devastation caused by the floods are deeply distressing and our thoughts are with the people of Nepal and everyone who has been affected. It's difficult to predict events of this nature. It reminds us that preparedness today has to mean more than preparing for the risks that we already know. Climate events can be very difficult to anticipate. Geopolitical developments can change the assumptions on which businesses have been planned for years. Technology is moving at a pace that can make some of the skills and business models we take for granted look very different in a short period of time.
And we have seen how quickly the impact of geopolitical events are felt in the economy. The conflict in West Asia disrupted shipping through the straits of Hormuz, one of the world's most important energy routes. Traffic through the strait remains well below normal levels. Even now for a country like India, these things have very direct consequences. Energy costs go up, shipping costs change, insurance premiums change, supply chains get disrupted and eventually all that finds its way into the cost of doing business.
Yet despite all this, the Indian economy grew at 7.8% in the April to June quarter. Investment grew by 11.9% while manufacturing and services remained important contributors to growth. This tells us about the underlying strength of the Indian economy. We have a very ambitious trajectory ahead of us. We want to become one of the world's largest economies. We want to create productive employment for a very large young population. We want Indian companies to become much more significant participants in global value chains. So the question is how India can continue to grow through periods of disruption.
And if you look at what that requires, I think it brings us back to some fairly fundamental questions. Over the last few decades, we became very good at optimizing businesses for efficiency. We built global supply chains, reduced inventories, sourced from the lowest cost locations, and moved capital and products across borders very efficiently. But efficiency assumes a certain degree of stability. Today, the question is not only what is the most efficient way of doing this, but also what happens if something changes? Where do we source from? How quickly can we find an alternative? How much technology do we control ourselves? Do we have the talent to adapt? Can we continue to compete if energy prices change sharply or trade barriers go up?
And this is where the conversation on resilience becomes a conversation about competitiveness. How can we build the capability to engage with the world from a position of strength? If I take manufacturing, a sector which I've been involved in for the last 38 years, the reorganization of global supply chains creates a significant opportunity for India. But ultimately companies will come to India because it makes economic sense for them to do so. They will look at cost, quality, productivity, infrastructure, logistics, energy and the ability to deliver consistently at scale. So competitiveness remains fundamental.
We have made progress on many of these fronts, but there is still a lot more to do, particularly if you want to move beyond being a large market or an alternative manufacturing location and become a very important part of global value chains. Our free trade agreements are a good example of both the opportunity and the challenge. They create market access for Indian companies and market access is just the beginning. The real opportunity will go to companies that are ready on quality, standards, productivity and scale.
And that brings us to technology. India has shown it can adopt technology at remarkable speed. We saw it with digital payments and the internet and we are seeing it much more dramatically with artificial intelligence. But that opportunity for India is not only to be able to use these technologies but to use it to improve productivity. It is also to develop more of the technology design and intellectual property ourselves. There is a significant difference between assembling a product and designing and engineering that product. And the same is true across services, healthcare, financial technology, space, defense and energy.
And moving up the value chain will require technology, but it will also require people who know how to work with it. And that brings us to talent. India's demographic advantage is often talked about and rightly so. But a young population becomes an advantage only when the people have the skills and the opportunities to participate productively in the economy. The nature of those skills is changing as well. We will need people who really understand technology, work across different disciplines and this will put a greater responsibility on our education system, on industry and all of us as managers.
And then there is energy and strategic resources. The events of the last few years have reminded us how closely energy security and economic security are linked. India has made significant progress on renewables and we will need to continue that journey. The same applies to critical minerals and other strategic inputs. So in many of these areas the direction of travel is clear. We need to build more capability within the country. We need to diversify our sources of supply and we need to become more competitive.
But resilience is also about how organizations respond when things do change. It also means being willing to learn from the outside, including from other industries and other sectors and from other geographies. One of the advantages of platforms like IMA is that they bring people from different sectors and different parts of the economy into the same conversation and I'm sure we need more of that.
As we bring today's discussions, I hope we can keep coming back to this. How do we build the capabilities that allow India to keep growing even when the world around us keeps changing? That to me is what growth with resilience really means. I look forward to the discussions today. We have an excellent set of speakers and a very relevant set of subjects and I hope the conversations will help us think not only about the world that is changing around us but also about what we need to change within our organizations. Thank you and a very warm welcome once again to the National Management Convention. Thank you.
