Prime Minister of India - Dr. Manmohan Singh

PM's address at the International Congress on Productivity, Quality, Reliability, Optimization and Modelling

I am indeed very happy to be amidst you in this inaugural function of the International Congress on Productivity, Quality, Reliability, Optimization and Modelling, being organized jointly by the Indian Statistical Institute and the Quality Council of India and the DRDO. I greet all the participants in this important conference and wish you all productive discussions in this two day long event.

We live in times of intense competition and rapid technological change. Technology is eliminating or at least significantly reducing entry barriers in many industries and thus thereby increasing the number of providers of goods and services. The tremendous advances in communications technology now allow customers to buy from the best in a widely spread geographical area. In this sort of environment, the ability to merely meet a customer's requirement is not enough. What is needed to survive, to grow and to flourish, is a culture of excellence and one that fosters innovation. An enterprise, to stay competitive, needs to find faster, cheaper and better ways of doing things and at the same time deliver products of a high quality demanded by sophisticated customers.

We can say with a sense of satisfaction that in the last couple of decades many Indian enterprises have been able to excel by international standards. We have seen spectacular successes in sectors like Information Technology and Information Technology Enabled Services, pharmaceutical industry, automobiles, design engineering and oil refining. Our enterprises have set benchmarks for project execution in areas like refineries and software. The traditional technological equations are fast changing with many multinational enterprises setting up their R&D bases in India. All this has been possible because of a relentless focus on productivity and quality. Despite these successes, we still have a far way to go in institutionalizing the culture of excellence embedded into the thought and working processes of Indian enterprises. I hope you will consider in your deliberations on how to make this thing happen.

In the last few decades the characteristics of markets and customers have changed drastically. The systems of production and service delivery have also undergone significant changes. The extent of this change may be similar to or even greater than what we witnessed in the beginning of the last century. That was the time when systems of mass production were put in place and there was a quantum jump in quality and productivity in many industrial sectors. Today also the use of technology in planning and supply chain management has the enormous potential to improve productivity, reduce cycle times as well as inventory levels drastically. Published case studies show at over 10 times improvement in these areas in many organizations has taken place. But, such improvements do not happen easily and as a matter of course. Improvements in quality, productivity and reliability require the use of sophisticated techniques of statistics and operations research. A lot of development is taking place in these areas internationally and it is time to disseminate the latest knowledge so that it can be used by organizations across our country. It is also necessary that academicians and practitioners often come together to ponder over how we as a nation can truly benefit from development in these areas across the world at large.

I am very happy that this conference has had an overwhelmingly large response. I have been told with over 500 delegates as participants and a large number of papers being presented, I am sure it will contribute substantially to the understanding of ways and means to improve quality, productivity and reliability and also of the tools of optimization and modelling.

The techniques for increased quality, productivity, reliability through optimization and modelling are not only useful for private enterprises but also for those engaged in the delivery of public services. In fact they can be used to design government services optimally so that service delivery becomes much more cost effective and reliable. As an illustration, the technique of productivity improvement can be used to enhance agricultural productivity as well as productivity of the overall supply chain management. There can be many more such applications. I hope your conference will give some attention to using most modern techniques to improve delivery of government services.

With these words, let me end by wishing your conference all success. It is my sincere wish to see the deliberations here contributing to improvements in quality, productivity and reliability both in the public and private sectors. I sincerely hope this can grow into a multi movement in our nation's quest for the pursuit of excellence. May your path be blessed.