Naman Shrivastava has worked extensively as a strategy consultant to Government of India, and is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Global Governance Initiative. He is also an emerging markets enterprise scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy - one of the world's top-ranked international affairs school. His views are personal and do not reflect the position of Government of India. Naman is absolutely convinced that, in the long run, Indian inclusive institutions will work better than Chinese extractive ones. In addition, he spoke extensively about one of the most important problems India is currently facing: job creation for young people. One of President Modi's key political target is, in fact, to create millions of jobs for young unemployed Indians, and Naman believes that, despite the difficulties, he is delivering with the promise.

Maheshmurti Leni S Jadhav is a 33-year old young politician and criminal lawyer from India, belonging to the Congress Party. She is the National Coordinator of the All India Congress Committee's Research Department and she is former National General Secretary of the National Students Union of India.
She believes that India has a great structural problem, job creation, and Modi and the BJP are not addressing properly that issue. That's the reason why she believes that the Congress Party, despite being perceived as a very weak opposition party, will be soon back in government.

Niranjan Marjani is an independent Indian journalist. He stresses the need for India to develop a better primary education, which will be the foundation for betterment of Indian society as a whole.

Saumya Varma is a leading researcher for the Congress Party in India. According to Saumya, environmental conscience is not widespread in Indian population, and it is the role of the leadership to tackle the issue and lead the way for a green India. Moreover, Saumya believes that the government needs to intervene directly in the process of job creation, because the market forces will not be enough.

Vasuki Shastry is an associate fellow of the Asia-Pacific programme and was most recently global head of public affairs and sustainability at Standard Chartered Bank. ASEAN countries need massive investments in infrastructure, and China is supplying them through the Belt and Road Initiative. Despite some political backlash in the area, Chinese dynamism is helping in spurring some positive unintentional consequences: other countries want to compete with China to provide ASEAN countries with capital and skills to build up connectivity in the region.

Malminderjit Singh is the Editorial Head at the Institute of South Asian Studies. ASEAN countries have secured deep economic ties between themselves, but the next step of a NATO-style military alliance seems really far away. However, it must be noted that there is a steady growth in defense spending in the ASEAN group, making clear that balance of power is still important, also in South East Asia.

Kanti Bajpai is the director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation and Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. There is no doubt: China is investing massive amount of capitals in ASEAN countries. This doesn't mean that those countries are getting all enslaved by the so-called "debt trap". According to Kanti, stronger countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, or even Pakistan in South Asia, are starting to deeply scrutinize BRI investments, demonstrating that in this moment China is more in a defensive position rather than attacking.

Shanti is a consultant based in Jakarta and her view is very simple and straightforward: in the future, investments from the west will flow abundantly to ASEAN countries instead of China. Moreover, ASEAN countries are applying a higher level of political scrutiny over Belt and Road investments. In the worst-case scenario, ASEAN countries are even stepping back from some BRI projects.