I have not read a more thought-provoking speech in a long time. It was woven around a theme—India as a Developed Nation by 2020—which he had articulated even before he became the President in July 2002. That theme has now found its most holistic and inspirational articulation yet in what was perhaps Dr Kalam’s last I-Day-eve address to the nation. The beauty of this speech lies in accomplishing the challenging task of constructing a Big Idea with many small but solid and reliable building blocks.

What are these building blocks? Dr Kalam gives a wide variety of success stories and innovations that persuade us to conclude that, in spite of many things that dishearten us in India, there are many more that instill hope and confidence. The role models represent every field of nation-building: agriculture, rural development, water conservation, education, healthcare, information technology. Each of these examples is drawn from his own personal experiences during his travels across the country. By highlighting these examples, the President urges the governments (Central and state) and also various sections of the society to work towards their large-scale replication.

Rainwater harvesting? Learn from what the villagers in Mizoram have done, says Dr Kalam. Affordable and workable health insurance? Look at the initiative of Narayan Hridayalaya in Bangalore. Enhancing rice and wheat productivity? Examine the successful TIFAC project in Bihar and eastern UP. Computer-aided quality education in municipal schools? Replicate the ‘‘accelerated learning model’’ pioneered by the Azim Premji Foundation in Karnataka.

To those who doubted the feasibility of his pet project PURA (Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas), he points to the success stories at the Periyar PURA in Tamil Nadu, Loni PURA in Maharashtra, Nanaji Deshmukh’s Chitrakoot PURA in Madhya Pradesh and the Byraju PURA in Andhra Pradesh. He tells us how, ‘‘independent of any government initiative’’, these rural clusters have established the four essential connectivities of the PURA concept—‘‘physical, digital and knowledge connectivity, leading to economic connectivity’’.

He tells us how these have led to large-scale employment generation, created local entrepreneurs, promoted thousands of women’s self-help groups, transformed hundreds of acres of wasteland into cultivable land, encouraged villagers to diversify into bio-fuel, herbal and medicinal plants, and set up dedicated marketing centres, food processing units and power generation plants using bio-mass. ‘‘We need 7,000 PURAs all over the country,’’ said Dr Kalam.

The distinguishing feature of the speech, however, is Dr Kalam’s philosophy of development which, in the words of Swami Vivekananda, should straddle both ‘‘nation-building’’ and ‘‘man-making’’. This can be seen in the way he describes a unique experiment called ‘Jeevan Vidya’, which is being conducted by Prof Ganesh Bagaria, IIT, Kanpur, and Prof Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad. ‘‘This scheme,’’ Dr Kalam tells us, addresses ‘‘the basic causes of major problems of violence, corruption, exploitation, domination, terrorism and war. Jeevan Vidya develops tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty in human conduct by enabling self-knowledge that understands harmony in the self and in the entire existence. (It) is a teachable human value-based skill that can address inherent conflicts within the mind of the individual, within families, in organisations and in public life...This whole movement of inquiry into knowledge, into oneself, into the possibility of something beyond knowledge would bring about naturally a psychological revolution. From this comes inevitably a totally different order in human relationship and therefore society as a whole. The intelligent understanding of this process itself can bring about a profound change in the consciousness of mankind.’’