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MULLINS: Democracy is struggling under an authoritarian government in Myanmar, but it's flourishing next door in India. Voters there have just cast their election ballots. The counting is underway and India's political leadership is now up for grabs. India is the world's biggest Democracy in terms of population, and its economy continues to grow even in the midst of the current global crisis. Nandan Nilekani thinks that this is a key moment in India's development. Nilekani is one of India's best known software entrepreneurs. He's Co-Chair of the technology company Infosys. He's also the author of a booked "Imaging India." He recently spoke about India's future with the BBC.

NANDAN NILEKANI: India is an idea. I think when India was set up in 1947, it was just, you know, the realization of the vision of a lot of very patriotic and committed people. I feel there's a need to bring the story up to date because India, I believe, is at a very critical juncture in its life. It can choose the high road or the low road. The juncture is caused because India is having what is called a demographic dividend, and when you have a demographic dividend, is when you have a very large number of young people in the age of 15 to 65 and very few old people and very few babies. So it has a very low dependency and that's the time when a country normally has its greatest era because more people work, less people to support. But the demographic dividend is only as good as the human capital you have, that they're well fed, they're educated and they need their roads to go to work and school, and their lights to study at night. If you don't do that, then the demographic dividend can be squandered. Because, you know, if have a very large young population who is aspirational, who's exposed to the media who sees how the world is living and if they don't get a chance to participate in that, then you're going to have huge divisions in our society, in Indian society between the rich and the poor, between the north and the south, between urban and rural, between different caste groups, between different religions—you know, Hindu, Christian, Hindu, Muslim. And the bitterness and division that comes out of that could be potentially very difficult. Because we have this young population, they have never seen a closed economy; they've seen an open economy. They have been exposed to television and media, radio, Internet, mobile phones. Their aspirations have been unleashed. So this generation is not at all fatalistic. In fact, they're very confident of the future. The challenge we have is, is the country ready for these people? Is the country ready to deal with the aspirations of these young people, and that's really the key issue. Changing a society of this size is a long and complicated task. I mean, I think when Western societies change, I mean, if you look at the history of how change happened in the U.K. or the U.S., it took hundreds of years, and it happened with much smaller populations. It happened when economic growth rates were much lower. The average growth rate from 1820 to 2020 would be about 2% a year in Europe. Whereas here, we're talking about countries growing at 8% a year. We're talking about a billion people. We're talking about doing it in a full democracy whereas many of these changes in West didn't happen for democracies. Democracies came out of that but they didn't start with that. So it's a very, very different environment. So we have to understand the complexities other than the fact that it's having a need of very high media and communication, the people know what's happening around them. So, you know, in all this chaos to drive change is a very complex situation. It's not simple, but why not give it a try.

MULLINS: Nandan Nilekani is Co-Chairman of Infosys, one of India's leading technology companies.

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