Speeches
Speech
Building a Smart Grid has become a top priority for India. Approximately 45 percent of India’s poorest households lack access to electricity and approximately 20 percent of its installed electricity capacity is lost to various technical and commercial inefficiencies. These combined technical and commercial losses threaten to deplete state finances that are already strained, but also prohibit millions of Indians from living with a stable and reliable power source.
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"Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world." These are the immortal words of Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, the great American humanitarian and scientist who pioneered the Green Revolution. As many of you know, in the mid-1960s, Dr. Borlaug teamed up with Dr. M.S. Swaminathan to drastically increase wheat yields in India, helping this country become self-sufficient in food. Some of my family members, who hail from Punjab, still remember the dramatic impact of the Green Revolution.
Last week, I visited the statue of Dr. Borlaug, which is just behind the hall where we are meeting today. It was a powerful reminder of the legacy of this extraordinary human being, who saved tens of millions of lives in the 20thcentury. I think Dr. Borlaug would be very pleased with the cooperation we are undertaking today.
Speech
The United States and India have a long and successful strategic partnership in the energy sector. In 2009, our governments held a Strategic Dialogue focusing on five pillars including energy and climate change.
One of the most significant outcomes of this Dialogue is our Partnership to Advance Clean Energy, or the “PACE” initiative, launched by President Obama and former Prime Minister Singh in November 2009. It remains the flagship program for clean energy between the United States and India.
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We are here to inaugurate the use of the power systems modeling tool PLEXOS, by Energy Exemplar, under our joint Clean Energy Program: the Partnership to Advance Clean Energy – Deployment – PACE-D. Power systems modeling is a core element of the newest addition to PACE-D called Greening the Grid, which focuses on large-scale integration of renewable energy.
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It is encouraging to see India's large and vibrant private sector focusing on new approaches to improve social and development outcomes, working together with the public sector in order to be more effective. This is especially important because the private sector can provide critical insights on market dynamics and new opportunities while the publc sector has a mandate to make these improvements sustainable and extend them even further.
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At USAID, we believe that every mother and child should be given the opportunity to survive and grow. Ending preventable child and maternal deaths means, first, giving children a healthy start by providing pregnant mothers with quality antenatal care and nutrition during pregnancy.
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The Millennium Alliance has grown from three founding partners in 2012 - FICCI, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Science and Technology - to now having eight partners including UKAID, ICCO Cooperation, ICICI Foundation, Wadhwani Initiative for Sustainable Health (WISH) Foundation and the World Bank. It has been an impressive journey and we are proud to have all of you as part of the alliance.
What began as a seven million dollar initiative is now a 25 million dollar and growing partnership that is supporting nearly 62 innovators through seed funding and capacity building services, as well as an additional 100 innovators with networking and advisory assistance. We are leveraging the best of our partner institutions and the best of private Indian philanthropy to develop solutions to tough challenges, making our joint assistance more efficient and effective. The alliance has proved that when we work together, we’re a powerful force for change.
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Indian farmers need climate adaptation support, and they need it promptly. That is why USAID/India and Skymet Weather Services started a four-year “Partnership in Climate Services for Resilient Agriculture in India” in October 2015 to help a farmer decide which crop to sow and how to harvest best results against the threats of climate change.
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I hope that 50 years from now someone will look back on the projects we're supporting today and deliver a speech about perspectives. Maybe he or she will ask the audience to recall a time when people still had TB. Or when women and children were unable to reach their full potential because they did not have access to quality health care. Maybe he or she will reference a life-saving vaccine that was invented and patented in India in 2016? Or a game-changing program that eliminated preventable mother and child deaths.
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Tuberculosis (TB) is silently killing India. An estimated 2.2 million cases are reported annually: of these 220,000 prove fatal. Or to put it simply, two people die of TB every three minutes in India. This is the highest number of deaths from TB anywhere in the world.
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Last updated: June 20, 2017
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