We are gathered today to jointly honour two Prime Ministers of India, Lal Bahadur Shastriji and Rajiv Gandhiji. Shastriji was among Pandit Nehru's closest and most trusted colleagues. His simplicity and humility endeared him to all. And it was the quality of his intellect, the perspicacity of his views, and his penetrating political insights which made him Prime Minister. I am glad to learn that this Institute founded in his memory has dedicated itself to not merely technical learning - important as that is - but above all to inculcating in its students the high moral and ethical values which have made Shastriji something of an icon of uprightness in public life. It is these young students, it is you, who are charged with the responsibility of "restoring India to the vanguard of human civilization" during the course of this century, the 21st century.

Rajiv Gandhi's vision of India included, of course, a technological dimension but it was much more a moral vision. The phrase I have just used - "restoring India to its traditional position in the vanguard of world civilization" - was his own. He arrived at it after deep reflection. It summed up the quintessence of where he wished to take India. He neither sought greatness for India in terms of material parameters alone nor, as a votary of Mahatma Gandhi and Panditji, did he define greatness in terms of military strength. Nor, indeed, in terms of political influence. Above all, he saw India's greatness in terms of her moral stature, of the contribution which India makes not only to her own people but to all of humankind. We have to place Rajiv Gandhi's contribution to India in the Information Age in the larger context of his moral vision of India.

I would like to take you through each element of that phrase again. Rajivji did not seek to "take" India to greatness but to "restore" it to that position. For his understanding of Indian history - and nowhere better has this been expressed than in Panditji's 'The Discovery of India' - was that over the millennia India's contribution to world civilization has been unique.

First, it is the only civilization which had based itself on the principle of unity in diversity. Where all other civilizations have spread and sustained themselves by imposing a pattern and uniformity on the people who came within its fold, inclusiveness and synthesis had been the hallmark of India's five thousand years of history.

Second, from the Buddha to the Mahatma, from the Bhagvad Gita to the Upanishads, and through the tradition of the Sufis and the Bhakti Movement, there has been a recognition of the values of non-attachment and renunciation. It had always been our duty to make a better world - and the achievements of India in the material and aesthetic sphere have been spectacular - but not as an end in itself; India's civilization has always seen the hollowness of grasping greed.

Third, non-violence, the remarkable message that from the time of Mahavira and through the interaction with the Sermon on the Mount and the Zendavasta and the Guru Granth Sahib has had India upholding the torch of Ahimsa through the long course of the dark centuries. All these and more are interwoven in Rajivji's vision of restoring India to greatness.

Which is why Rajivji spoke of restoring India to its "traditional place in the vanguard". Here I would like to stress the two words :""traditional" and "vanguard". Rajivji was not speaking of some fashionable aspiration to lead the world. On the contrary, he saw that barring the colonial aberration of two centuries, India had through almost all of five millennia been in the lead. The vanguard was its traditional position. And, finally, he saw the vanguard not in terms of limited economic, military, political or technological goals but in the widest possible terms - in terms of human civilization as a whole, encompassing the spiritual as much as the material.

Visionary though he was, Rajiv Gandhi was also intensely practical. He recognised that an India locked in the poverty trap was an India that could not aspire to the vanguard of human civilization. And he saw in science and technology the key to opening the doors to the required breakthrough. It is difficult to believe that just 15 years ago, Rajivji was mocked as a "computer boy" - and that too by those who are today talking in terms of IT-driven growth and Convergence Bills. When Rajivji set up his first mission, the telecom mission, a vast swathe of our political class dismissed him as "elitist", and obsessed with gadgetry and toys. Today, we can gladly acknowledge the validity of Rajivji's vision through the panchayat telephone, the Public Call Offices, and the STD/ISD booths you can see even in the remotest nooks and corners of the country. If India today is IT-enabled, the root cause is the vision of one man - a man, alas, ahead of his time and, therefore, not honoured in his day, but that is, perhaps, the fate of all visionaries.

I need hardly labour before an audience such as this the sea-change which the Information Technology revolution is already bringing about in the country. Papers before us show that within the next seven or eight years, the number of Indians engaged in IT will soar to over a million, that the income generated in the IT sector will exceed Rs. 80,000 crore, that IT related exports will rise to $ 50 billion, and, as everybody now knows, Indian brain-power will emerge as the most-sought after resource on the IT market. It is these numbers you will be analysing over the next few days and I would not wish to pre-empt you. Your expertise in this domain is, undoubtedly, superior to mine.

However, we should reflect on certain dimensions which might not immediately suggest themselves to us. For instance, the figure of Rs. 80,000 crore per annum which is indicated as the IT turnover seven years from today. It is almost exactly equal to the entire Central Plan Outlay of Rs. 88,000 crore in this year's Budget. How much of this turnover will be garnered by the best-off segments of the economy and how much of it will reach the doors of the poor? This is something all of us must think about.

We might also remind ourselves that although the IT employment target of 1 million jobs over the next seven years is very impressive, it constitutes just about 0.1 percent of our population. Moreover, the opportunity will be available not to the illiterate or ill-educated, or those with modest academic achievement, but to the very best and the very brightest of our youth. Our employment target is a million jobs a year, of which IT will contribute about one percent. The hopes of our poor must necessarily vest far more in improvements in the solid growth of the old economy than miracles in the new.

Also, as this one million young men and women would, in any case, have found a job, IT will not be giving them jobs so much as giving them better jobs. Most worrying is that all this could enhance inequalities and distort income distribution. I say this not to discourage progress in IT but to caution against euphoria. Our society, needs not only growth but growth with social justice. Growing inequalities are not compatible with the democratic order. And so, as IT revolution is fuelled, we must concern ourselves with how the fruits of that revolution can be shared between those in the forefront of the revolution and those less fortunate.

It is not the number of IIT and IIM graduates who secure HB-1 visas but the number of the poor who are directly or indirectly benefited by the IT revolution that would constitute the measure of our success in realizing Rajivji's vision of India in the 21st century. This century will be the Indian Century only if the nation never forgets Gandhiji's talisman - that whenever in doubt we ask ourselves how what we propose to do will benefit the poorest person we know.

I extend to all participants my warmest good wishes for an excellent seminar and to Anil Shastri and his colleagues my congratulations and good wishes for the success of this monument to the memory of one of the noblest Indians of all time, Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri.