Transcript
Edited for readability.
More than a hundred years ago, Swami Vivekananda returned from Chicago — we all know about his famous speech there. After he came back to India, he gave a series of lectures, from Colombo, where he landed in what was then Ceylon, right up to Almora. In these lectures he exhorted the country to awaken. Many of the ideas we hear in our national discourse today — the seed ideas — were presented by him then.
One of his key messages was: let us create karmayogis on every street corner.
The premise is this. Viksit Bharat is not going to be made by great people. There is no great person out there who is going to solve our problems. Viksit Bharat is going to be built by millions of karmayogis in every walk of life.
That is the fundamental shift in responsibility. No great leader — and there are many great leaders — can actually solve our problems for us. We are the people who are going to solve them.
What a karmayogi looks like in everyday roles
What does this mean? Take the example of a karmayogi teacher. On one side you have an ordinary teacher who might do just the minimum work, drawing a government salary. On the other side is someone who is engaged with students.
This looks like a simple visual. But look at the consequence: 55% of rural children cannot read a Class 2 textbook, because so many of our teachers are non-karmayogis instead of karmayogis. Which government is going to change that? Those teachers have to take up their own change.
Take a government official. Even if there is a simple scheme to be implemented — an idea the government has decided on — the final execution lies with that official on the ground. If that person is not engaged, is not solving the problem, is not engaging with citizens to address and resolve their issues, and is only going to meet some targets, then you are not going to have results. It doesn’t matter whether policy gets made if people don’t execute it on the ground.
Take a banker. You go to a bank, and the person there only throws problems at you and explains why something cannot be done. A small business owner — an SME — goes there and is met with a hundred questions on why it can’t be done. What is the use of a banking policy, or even of so many banks, if the ordinary citizen is not able to make use of everything that is there?
So our real problem is the assimilation of policy into our day-to-day lives — the assimilation of our institutions, and what they can do, into our day-to-day lives. And for that, all these people have to become karmayogis.
Karmayogis by chance, not by design
Here is our problem. We do have karmayogis. We have contributors. But they occur by chance — one out of ten or fifteen people.
We once did a study with about 40 CEOs, asking how many contributors, or karmayogis, they had in their organisation. The average came to 3 to 4%. That means 3 to 4% of the organisation literally runs it in a meaningful way. The rest are just travelling along — following, and doing just what they need to do.
That is because these contributors are there by chance. They were trained that way, or born that way, or influenced in some way in their childhood or youth. What we need is to do it by design as a nation. If you want to create Viksit Bharat, you have to create karmayogis by design — and you need at least 100 million karmayogis for a nation of 1.4 or 1.5 billion people, something of that order. If you don’t, you will not be able to shift the needle for this nation.
So how do you do it? That, in a sense, is what we have spent almost 15 years experimenting with, across different groups of people in this country — school children, college students, people in banks, people in several government institutions. Our experimental size has been 5 million people, because that is the experimental size you need to solve the problem of a nation.
Let me share a little of what we have learned about what it takes to build karmayogis at scale, and by design.
Build karmayogis at scale, and by design
If you really think about it, the problem of creating karmayogis is actually a set of several problems.
1. Inner motivation and agency
The first is the problem of inner motivation. There is no agency. People complain; they feel caged.
There is data that correlates with this. There is an index used globally called the Power Distance Index, and India scores around 77 — one of the highest in the world. It means the distance you feel between senior and junior is very high. It means you want to take instructions. It means you learn from childhood to subsume your own agency.
You can respect your elders, but you have to respect them in a way that retains your agency. You need conscious obedience, not blind obedience. In fact there is a term for it: chaitanya buddhi. You use your buddhi, and it is chaitanya — conscious — only when you demonstrate service and obedience to your guru while retaining your own consciousness, and your right to discern and discriminate between right and wrong.
We have to awaken inner motivation. The consequence of inner motivation is that people stop being “outside-in.” They no longer say it can’t be done because the system is bad, or because processes don’t work.
This is something we have worked on, and we find that if you really get down to it, every individual in this room has a freedom space. You have a freedom space in your family life. You have a freedom space in your workplace. Even the smallest government servant, even the peon, has a freedom space. Even a cow tied to a pole has a freedom space within which it can move. Every living being with consciousness has a freedom space.
So what we say is: karma yoga starts when you recognise your own freedom space — and within that freedom space you contribute, you make a difference.
It is not a problem of structure. It is not a problem of systems. It is a problem of recognising the freedom space, and cultivating enough agency in me to say: within my freedom space, let me make a difference.
2. Alignment
The second is the problem of alignment. Take our country, or any organisation. We call it the Bigfoot problem: hundreds of small feet going in different directions, each pulling its own way out of self-interest or groupism — whether it comes from regionalism or all kinds of other things. We have seen this in large organisations.
If you want alignment, you need people to start aligning to a shared goal. But so much effort is put on targets, on creating alignment top-down, that we have forgotten that alignment is given, not extracted.
Viksit Bharat cannot be created by law or by imposition. It will be created because each one of us in this room chooses to say, “Yes, I want to contribute to it.” And if each one of us does not choose, nothing will happen.
That is why organisations have to create that sense of choice in every individual. Which leads to the next requirement: people must vividly envision the end state. They must know where we are going. We must have a shared understanding of how we are working. That is a whole problem by itself that we need to solve.
3. Expanded ownership
The third problem we face — perhaps due to hundreds of years of slavery, or whatever the reason — is that, unfortunately, we are exceptionally self-centred as a people, in organisations and elsewhere. Perhaps one of the reasons is that we spent so much of our energy over centuries just surviving and dealing with shortages of every kind. Whatever the causes — I am not getting into them — the fact is that a little expansion is needed: from self, to organisation, to society.
A little expansion at the school level, where you get children to stop saying “only I must come first in the class,” and to ask instead, “How can we succeed as a team?” No marks are given in school for working in teams. Marks are given only for coming first, or for whatever your rank is.
Through all my four years at IIT, nobody taught me the meaning of teamwork. What we learned, we learned because we took part in competitions and figured it out ourselves.
So this whole problem of expanded ownership — self, organisation, community, society — is something we need to consciously nurture in people. And it can’t be done after people graduate. It has to be done right from school onwards.
4. Human touch and imaginative sympathy
The next is a simple problem of what I call human touch and imaginative sympathy. Imaginative sympathy is an interesting phrase. A bureaucrat sitting with a file sees the rules. He sees the numbers. What he does not see is the human impact of his actions.
How many times do people consciously think about the human impact of their actions? Whether you are sitting in an office as a bureaucrat or wondering how you are going to get something done, the human impact of what you do has to be understood. That is an issue by itself — that, and the simple thing of respect for people. These need to be worked on.
5. Collaboration
Then of course there is the problem of collaboration. In India, for example, 60% of projects are delayed — 60%.
We worked with one of the largest project organisations in the country, and what we found is that the single biggest problem is simply the lack of collaboration between teams. Any project or job in India that involves multiple people fails or is delayed. Anything that relies on individual genius succeeds. So the issue is getting people to work together across multiple teams.
6. Trust
And the most important problem of all is the problem of trust. Through every action, we build trust or we destroy trust.
A simple act of corruption, a simple act of delaying things, can create a trust deficit. We don’t realise how a trust deficit adds up until one day the whole edifice falls. Just as we don’t notice a trust surplus building up — until one day it suddenly starts giving us enormous value and results back. How do we make our people, at all levels, conscious of this trust surplus and trust deficit? That becomes one of our central questions.
How do we solve these problems?
Because of time constraints I won’t go into detail, but there are three or four thoughts I want to leave with you.
The power of ideals
First, we need to learn to trust ideals again. We have great ideals. Karma yoga is a phenomenal ideal.
But by karma yoga we need not mean the selflessness of someone working without any thought of results. The problem in India has been that our ideals were so high that they became impractical for the ordinary person. So perhaps we need ideals that are halfway — not those lofty ideals that are inaccessible to all of us. Maybe we don’t need to think of selfless work; maybe we can think of enlightened self-interest. Maybe we don’t need to think of sacrificing our all, but we can at least think win-win. That much is within our power. Can we move from win-lose — I win at your cost — to at least winning as a nation?
These kinds of ideals matter, and we have found they have powerful effects. I’ll also share an interesting insight, and here I agree with the earlier speakers: ordinary people respond to ideals far better. In a large bank we worked with, for example, people at the lower levels responded far more to ideals than those interested only in becoming chairman or MD. Those people were so blocked out that they had no time for ideals. They were only interested in targets and in reaching the top of the rat race. But these ideals are available to our 100 million people.
The need for enabling tools
You also need to give people new tools. AI, or whatever it is, is not a bad thing — provided we transform it into simple tools that don’t take away our brains but strengthen our hearts. How we do that becomes one of our challenges.
Creating Support Systems
Then of course there is giving people various kinds of support systems. One of the fundamental gaps we have discovered in all our work is that we set up access structures very well in our country, but there are no support systems.
Take jobs, or careers in rural areas. There are no support systems that help people deal with their lack of self-confidence, or their lack of visibility into what will happen in their careers. They have nothing other than access. We say we’ll set up a career guidance cell. So we give a lot of access in our country. All our talk is about access. It is not about enablement. It is not about support systems that strengthen people. We assume people will find the strength themselves. It doesn’t happen.
And we assume that the mere existence of access will result in developmental outcomes. We haven’t seen that happen in any of the areas we’ve worked in.
Protocols, not just processes
And then protocols. You might ask, what are protocols? A simple example: all this controversy about how much the police should or should not react actually comes down to protocols.
We have processes, but we don’t give people dynamic abilities — we don’t say, “Here is your space; use these simple protocols, these guidance systems, to respond.” Because we don’t trust our people to operate with those guidance systems. We are, for example, creating “flashpoint” tools that do exactly this.
The idea behind it is that you need to move from processes that are very rigid to protocols that give people dynamic spaces in which they can use their freedom spaces better. It means a new paradigm of thinking, if you really want to do this.
Where we have seen it work
Keeping all this in mind, and given the paucity of time, let me give you just a sense of three or four key points before I close.
Schools. The first and most important learning from our work with schools is that you need to give students a new vision of themselves — and they respond to it brilliantly. Give them a vision of themselves as having infinite possibilities. Where does this vision come from? It comes from Vedanta. Vedanta says that each one of us has infinite capacity, infinite possibilities. It is a great civilisational truth that we carry with us, and these civilisational truths have to be taught back to our students. When you do that, it changes how they think about themselves. They see life as possibilities — not as constraints, and not as targets to be achieved.
Government. Karmayogis are needed in the railways; karmayogis are needed in customs. Right now we are working with the Maharashtra government across 36 districts, with every frontline officer, on how to improve the quality of citizen services. People would say it can’t be done. Well, we find that 70–80% of them respond brilliantly, because they value themselves. But you have to speak their language. You can’t speak a management language, a language external to them. If you speak the language of Indian ideals and Indian values, they get it — and when they get it, they change. Perhaps the problem was simply that we had imposed a foreign language on them.
Universities. We need to create a pipeline of karmayogis. If you create that pipeline, you won’t be creating job seekers; you will be creating potential contributors to our nation. That is a big job in front of us.
Corporations. And of course corporations — but given the paucity of time I won’t go deeper. This gives you a sense of where we stand in our overall thinking.
Closing
The last point I want to make is this. If you want to create karmayogis, the most important thing is to create a shared vision of everyone working together. That is how Viksit Bharat will be built.
Thank you very much.