Panel discussion to analyse India’s standing globally coming up

The ‘Our India’ panel discussion by BIC has eminent panelists

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: The Bangalore International Center (BIC) is organising a panel discussion to analise India’s standing in the current century, and whether India is on the right path to attain success.

G R Gopinath the founder of Air Deccan, which played a big role in the revolutionising Indian air travel by enabling common people to use air services, is among some of the prominent panelists at the event. He is also a retired army officer and an award-winning farmer.

Gopinath is the author of ‘Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey ‘and ‘You Cannot Miss This Flight: Essays on Emerging India’. He was the face behind the biopic Sora Rao Potru which went on to win a national film award. Another eminent panelist in the discussion is Gopal Krishna Gandhi, who read History and English Literature at Delhi University.

He held several diplomatic and administrative positions; he was the secretary to the Vice President of the country from 1985-1987, and he then became a Joint Secretary and secretary to the President of India from 1987-2000. He was also the High Commissioner for India in Sri Lanka, South Africa, Lesotho, and he was the Ambassador of India in Iceland and Norway after which he became the Governor of West Bengal.

He is also a Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Awardee and a Lal Bahadur Shastri award winner. Panelist Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is an IAS Officer from Karnataka cadre, 1992 batch. She has worked closely with the women and child development sector alongside planning sectors, the Department of Atomic Energy, and many others.

She was also a participant in forming Karnataka’s First Human Development Report. She is an active writer for national publications and writes about art, culture, and development issues. A scribe with an experience of over two decades, S Raghotham will be joining the discussion and will bring his share of experience.

He is a 2012 Chevening Scholarship holder at Oxford University and a Master of Arts distinction in Defence and Security Analysis from Lancaster University, England. He is also an occasional contributor to Oxford Analytica, UK besides having worked for several prominent national dailies. The event is scheduled for January 13 and 14 at the BIC, Domlur.