Speech of Thanks at India Development Marketplace 2007

Your Excellency the President of India, members of our eminent jury, our innovative participants, and ladies and gentlemen,

It gives me great pleasure to thank His Excellency, the President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for inaugurating the Second Development Marketplace held by the World Bank in India. This is the second time that His Excellency has graced our Marketplaces for innovative ideas.

Being a scientist himself, the search for creative new ideas and grassroots innovations to address the most pressing development challenges of the day is a subject close to the President’s heart. His presence here today has been a huge encouragement to all of us.

I would also like to thank our eminent jury who have spared so much of their precious time to go through the large number of proposals and evaluate the merits of each.

This competition drew an overwhelming response, and we thank all our participants for their very well thought out and detailed proposals. Thank you, too, for making the effort to come to Delhi to display your wonderful ideas before us.

And, last but not least, I would like to thank our India country office team for their enormous hard work over the past year in bringing all of us together and making this event possible.

The dynamism we see in India today is largely due to the efforts of a new generation of creative thinkers and doers. Globally, India has many successful examples of development innovations like the women’s self-help groups in Andhra Pradesh, the milk producers of Anand, and the SEWA women, just to mention a few.

And, as we have seen today, there are many more innovative thinkers whose out- of- the- box thinking can lead to simple and creative solutions to the world’s growing environmental challenges.

As one of the key promoters and financiers of environmental management in the developing world, the World Bank is keenly interested to support creative solutions. We are always on the lookout for ideas that deliver results and have the potential to be expanded or replicated from one country to another.

In all our programs, the World Bank places great emphasis on the active participation of communities in their own development. We are increasingly supporting community-driven projects. A good example is our project to help rural communities in the driest parts of Andhra Pradesh to cope with climate change by restoring some 3,000 traditional rain water harvesting tank systems.

Finally, let me end by noting that everyone of the participants today is a winner for making to the finalist stage. While the best judged ideas will receive funding of upto $20,000, all of the rest will also receive a token of appreciation of Rs 20,000. Let me also emphasize that today’s event is really part of an ongoing process.  

We will follow up on translating the innovative ideas of the winning projects into action and gathering lessons for wider application. We will disseminate these lessons within the World Bank and the development community at large. And we will link the successful ones with financiers for replication or scaling up. Two years down the line our winners will be here again to share the results of their efforts with us.

Till we meet again, then, I thank all of you very sincerely once again. We hope you have found this an exciting exchange of ideas. We certainly have. Together we can become part of a group that is really making a difference.