Take Unpopular Measures To Accelerate Growth: Bill Gates To BJP Government

NEW DELHI: Billionaire Bill Gates on Thursday called on the BJP government to take unpopular steps to accelerate growth, while pushing for an increase in the country’s healthcare spend.

“For the overall economy to grow, India needs to do unpopular things — do things that are good for the country. What good is a mandate if you can’t do unpopular things,” said the founder of Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who is in India this week.

On healthcare spending, Gates said, “A few things are still unclear…when push comes to shove, health budgets will need to go up. It will be interesting to see if that goes up.”

His wife and co-founder of the eponymous Foundation, Melinda Gates, said, “We are enthused with the Modi government. They will roll out four new key vaccines across India and that is huge. Nearly 1.4 million children die every year and this rollout will help a lot to bring down disease and improve health.”

In an indirect reference to the government’s Jan Dhan Yojana scheme, which aims at financial inclusion, Bill Gates said, “It’s good that more people have bank accounts, but quality of those accounts also needs to improve.”

The Foundation was created in 2001 and started work in India in 2003. It is the world’s largest foundation with an endowment of around $40 billion. Since it started work in India, the foundation has spent $1 billion on projects including HIV/AIDS prevention, polio eradication, tuberculosis, educating couples on family planning and sanitation. The power couple was in conversation with author Chetan Bhagat.

When asked about the Indian government targeting NGOs, Gates said, “It does not hurt us, but the FCRA (Foreign Contribution Regulation Act) approval process is long.”

On being asked what made Gates opt for philanthropy and not start another company after Microsoft, Gates said: “In terms of a new path, Microsoft had a huge impact. Philanthropy also has a huge impact, but in a different dimension. We saw that a lot of the diseases were neglected by governments. And lot of the rich world didn’t have those diseases. Here we saw very unique opportunity to intervene.”

Gates said the generation that begins a business doesn’t believe in dynasty, but once fortune is passed down in a dynastic manner, it’s hard to stop.” That’s like thinking the best way to get Olympic teams is to get grandchildren of winners sixty years ago to play — it doesn’t work that way. Fortunately, the trend now is in favour of philanthropy,” he said.