HTLS 2026 LIVE: ‘Need humans to provide services’, World Bank's Neelkanth Mishra addresses deglobalisation concerns

HTLS 2026 LIVE: The 24th edition of the event brings together influential voices to examine shifting realities across economies, geopolitics, technology, business, and society as the world enters an era defined by rapid disruption and unprecedented change.

HTLS Summit 2026 LIVE: This year’s summit will examine the forces reshaping how people live, lead, and shape the future. The summit also aims to examine how leaders can navigate a landscape where certainty is increasingly being replaced by adaptation.

HTLS 2026 LIVE: The Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026 kicked off on Thursday (November 12) with two virtual sessions. On the second day of the summit (Friday), Neelkanth Mishra, Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Sri Lanka at The World Bank Group, interacted with Josey John, Editor-in-Chief of Mint....Read More

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• 13 Nov 2026, 05:57:50 PM IST

  What Neelkanth Mishra said on critics questioning India’s electronics manufacturing progress

  World Bank's Neelkanth Mishra was asked about critics questioning India’s electronics manufacturing progress “being still in the assembly stage.”

  He said that the assembly stage is where one begins to build an industry. “So if you look at how Japan started in the 60s, Korea did it in the 70s, Taiwan did it in the 80s, and China did it in the 90s, and now of course they're doing so much better than anyone expected,” he said.

  “Today the two nanometer chips, the cutting-edge GPUs of many of the best companies in the world are now all getting designed in India. Why don't we have Indian companies? It is partly because of the capital problem that, you know, risk capital is not available at scale. It wasn't, and now it's starting to become available,” he said.

• 13 Nov 2026, 05:44:06 PM IST

  Neelkanth Mishra explains how India can skill its youth for service jobs in other countries amid deglobalisation concerns

  He said that he advised on a report by the Convergence Foundation about three years back, which has now led to the creation of the Global Access for Talent from India (Gati) foundation.

  “It's not just in Europe, but in Korea, in Taiwan, in Japan. They need human bodies to provide many of the services. Not everything can be automated,” he said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Friday.

  Regarding immigration concerns, Mishra highlighted the importance of government-to-government contracts in addressing them. “...If you allow immigration to happen because you just need hands and bodies, and you have no control over it, then you get into problems of assimilation, problems of cultural change, and then resistance to immigration. If you can control it, meaning that you say that, you know, I'll have 200,000 people a year, or 200,000 people over three years,” he said.

• 13 Nov 2026, 05:38:05 PM IST

  Neelkanth Mishra on the problem of ‘economic growth without employment growth since 90s’

  Neelkanth Mishra, speaking at the HTLS summit 2026, highlighted the problem of “significant disguised unemployment in agriculture”, saying that “people pretend to be farmers because they don't have work.”

  Mishra also raised the “very low female labour force participation rates” as well as a “significant gap versus China or Taiwan.”

  He said, “I do think that jobs will be created. And the job creation, look, if you're growing at 7% to 8%, 7%, 7.5%, it is very unlikely that all of this is coming from productivity, even if you're deploying significant amounts of capital. So there will be, I think, 2% plus job creation.”

  “Many of those jobs may not be the highest quality, but the jobs will get created. I am, for economies like ours, I'm actually a lot less worried about AI at a net level. There will be disruption; there will be jobs that become redundant at large scale,” he added.

• 13 Nov 2026, 05:32:01 PM IST

  On devolution of power, Neelkanth Mishra says Odisha is ‘making significant improvements’

  He said that Odisha is making “significant improvements” in the devolution of power from level-two governments to level-three governments due to the “freedom given to local governments and the involvement of public-private partnerships.”

  “You know, so there are limitations in terms of how much capital exists with the central and state governments. I think it's very important to involve private capital. And for that to happen, you need to have revenue sources, you need to be able to make the politically hard decisions of charging for water, charging for solid waste…putting in place sewage management. And I think all of those require the state to devolve power to the municipal corporations and the municipalities. And I think that's something that Odisha seems to have done,” he said.

• 13 Nov 2026, 05:25:26 PM IST

  What should be the next set of reforms India should go after? Neelkanth Mishra reveals

  Speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Friday, Neelkanth Mishra, Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Sri Lanka at the World Bank Group, said that the reforms should be focused on the “devolution of power from level two governments to level three governments”.

  “Unless we get our cities right, there is going to be a cap on how fast we can grow our productivity and how sustainably we can grow our productivity. And that's a very deep problem,” he said.

  He acknowledged that states are starting to build “muscle on economic policy”, and some are even setting up economic advisory councils.

  But, he said, a lot more needs to happen. “This is important from the perspective of managing housing and urbanisation. This is important from the perspective of the right type of capital formation. It is also important from the perspective of attracting foreign capital, because those are the areas where a significant amount of private and foreign capital will be needed. So if I were to highlight the most important reform, that would be it,” he said.

  The second most important, or maybe competing with that in terms of priority, would be taxation, Mishra said.

• 13 Nov 2026, 05:16:41 PM IST

  Day 1 of Hindustan Times Leadership Summit: A recap

  On Thursday, two virtual sessions were held with VFS Global founder Zubin Karkaria and Anima Anandkumar, a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

  Zubin Karkaria said that Indian students have traditionally travelled to the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK; however, a shift towards Europe is being witnessed now. There’s a growth of students travelling to Europe by almost 70% every year, he said. Karkaria also said that whatever geopolitics or environmental conditions there are in the world, travel will always return, and it will return with a vengeance.

  Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, said that local languages and accessibility are important for frontier language models. “I saw a lot of startups—and not necessarily only in the language model space,” she said, pointing to space, batteries and similar hard engineering as India’s competitive strength in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). She also said that speed is only a part of the artificial intelligence story, and that AI also allows for better accuracy and reliability in scientific modelling.

• 13 Nov 2026, 04:40:46 PM IST

  Theme for this year's HT Leadership Summit

  This year’s summit will examine the forces reshaping how people live, lead, and shape the future.

  The theme, "New Rules. New Realities", captures a world in which established assumptions are being questioned, and new opportunities are taking shape.

  Launched in 2003, the HT Leadership Summit was established to enhance the level of discourse on critical issues, bring leaders from important fields together and provide an international-standard platform for exchanging ideas and exploring solutions.

• 13 Nov 2026, 04:18:00 PM IST

  All about Neelkanth Mishra, Executive Director at World Bank Group

  Neelkanth Mishra is an economist who currently represents Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka as an executive director at the World Bank Group in Washington DC.

  Before moving to the World Bank, he held important positions in both the Government of India and the private sector. He served as a part-time member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister from 2019, and also served in leadership roles in the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, the India Semiconductor Mission, the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Economic Affairs Council, Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya, and the National Council for Applied Economic Research.

  He also served as Chief Economist at Axis Bank, Head of Global Research, and Board Member at Axis Capital before spending nearly 20 years at Credit Suisse in Singapore, Taipei and Mumbai as an analyst and later as Co-Head of Asia Pacific Strategy and India Strategist.