Since it began in 2003, the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit has evolved to become a major international conference that invites opinion makers and thought leaders from across the world. Organized by the Hindustan Times group, this annual conference brings together leaders in politics, business, culture, science and sport to New Delhi to discuss, deliberate and debate the issues facing our planet.

The theme for the eighth summit held in 2009 was Vision 2020: Challenges for the Next Decade. Over two days of intense discussion and the question and answer sessions that followed, speakers such as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former US President George W. Bush spoke their minds. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Opposition leaders Sushma Swaraj, Sitaram Yechury and Sukhbir Singh Badal and former National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra also spoke at the summit. Other speakers included security expert Efraim Halevy, cricketers Sir Richard Hadlee, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, actors Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor and, from the world of business, Google?s Nikesh Arora, bankers Anshu Jain and Chanda Kochhar and entrepreneurs Rajiv Bajaj, Malvinder Singh and Preetha Reddy.

The summit explored core issues and challenges that face our rapidly changing world: the global economic recovery, the threats posed by terrorism, challenges of healthcare, the evolution of cricket and the new landscape of the internet.

This book is a compilation of those deliberations.