Blog

For India to grow at 9%-10% GDP growth year-on-year, it can’t happen without women, said Amitabh Kant, who is presently the G20 Sherpa during India’s G20 presidency, at SheSparks 2023 in New Delhi. 

“It can’t happen without the 50% of the population, which is women. It can’t happen till women don’t become great entrepreneurs. And it will not happen till women don’t innovate. And that’s why when India took over the G20 presidency, we had to spell out our priorities…one among them was women-led development,” the former CEO of NITI Aayog said at the event. 

Under its G20 presidency, India has constituted an engagement group—Women20—focused on gender equity. This group aims to ensure that gender considerations are mainstreamed to G20 discussions and translated into the G20 Leaders’ Declaration as policies and commitments that foster gender equality and women’s economic empowerment.

According to Kant, women should really not be beneficiaries but they should drive growth and lead development, growth, and progress.

“And the intention is that we bring this change not only in India but all over the G20 countries because they comprise 85% of the global GDP and almost 78% of the global trade. And our belief is that this can only happen if we can have fully empowered women,” he highlighted.

India has a vast potential for entrepreneurship, and the G20 Sherpa said that the women will play a transformational role. “They will be the path-breaker, and many of them will be from the rural areas to emerge and do pathbreaking works. Women are more hungry for disruption than men because men are the status quo. Women are more dynamic, gutsy, and visionary than men,” said Kant.

Kant also encouraged women to not worry about failing as every success story comes from failure. “All successful entrepreneurs have failed several times before succeeding. In India, failure is taken as stigma…but you all bounce back and disrupt the world again,” he said.