GIM Day 2: Focus on building for the world

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: The second day of Invest Karnataka 2022 got underway with a session by filmmaker Chadden Hunter on ‘India’s Pivotal Role in Arresting Climate Crisis’. Chadden has worked alongside Sir David Attenborough for over 20 years, documenting everything from snow leopards in Pakistan to scuba diving under the Antarctic ice sheet.

His anecdotes were as inspirational as they are entertaining and he used a stunning multi-media presentation to share his stories. This was followed by a fireside chat on ‘Innovation & Entrepreneurship In The Post-Pandemic World’ and panel discussions on ‘Revolution In India’s Mobility and India’s Quest For Self-Reliance’ which focused on how India, and Karnataka in particular, could build for the world.

The next session, Reinventing The Energy Ecosystem: Future Of Energy Generation In The World featured Adlan Ahmad, CEO of Petronas Hydrogen, Venu Nuguri, MD & CEO of Hitachi Energy in India, Kapil Maheshwari, President of Renewable Energy Development at RIL, and Vijay Nirani, MD of MRN Group, in a talk moderated by Karthik Ganesan.

The focus of the talk was on the role of renewable energy sources like Hydrogen, Ammonia, and Ethanol, with Kapil Maheshwari saying “India has all the chance to become an Industry leader in the field which is just beginning and no more be followers.”

Vijay Nirani said that Karnataka was leading the field in 2G Ethanol with 13 plants across the state with the largest owned by Shell near the airport. Kapil added that the demand for renewable energy was never the problem and they are working on bridging the supply gap.

The final panel discussion of the day was ‘Advancing Gender Diversity: Journey Post Shattering The Glass Ceiling’ with Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson & CEO of Salesforce India, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Executive Chairperson and Founder of Biocon Limited and Nisaba Godrej, Executive Chairperson of Godrej Consumer Products, on stage sharing their stories. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw stressed the need to be agnostic about technology.

“I felt insulted when I was told being a brewmaster wasn’t a profession for women. So I took the fermentation science I learned from that and focused it on creating Insulin and other lifesaving drugs,” she said as she shared her voyage of discovery and experimentation.

Arundhati Bhattacharya, who was the first woman to be the Chairperson of the State Bank of India, said “We need more empathy in the workplace to understand why women fall off the workforce. The Pandemic has shown that Work From Home is possible and we should learn from that when women need to stay home due to family emergencies but can still be productive.”

The discussion ended with Mazumdar-Shaw acknowledging the role of the men in their lives who supported them and wishing that the investment coming into Karnataka thanks to the event walked the talk of women empowerment.