Bill Gates to visit India next week. What he said about country’s ‘remarkable progress’

India as a country gives hope for the future, said Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in his blog Wednesday. He said that India has a world-leading approach to innovation which ensures that solutions can reach its millions of citizens in times of need.

“India has proven it can tackle big challenges. The country eradicated polio, lowered HIV transmission, reduced poverty, cut infant mortality, and increased access to sanitation and financial services,” wrote Bill Gates.

The co-chair of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that with the right approach, the world can tackle big problems at once. The inequality in global health, for example, is a solvable problem, but it is inextricably linked with climate change.

“The poorer a community is, the more vulnerable it is to climate change. And the more impacted a community is by extreme weather events, the more entrenched in poverty it becomes. To break the cycle, we need to make progress on both problems at the same time,” he wrote.

Gates said he is stubborn in his belief that we’re capable of making progress on lots of big problems at once—even at a time when the world faces multiple crises.

“There is no better proof than the remarkable progress that India has accomplished,” he said, giving the example of Indian Agricultural Research Institute, or IARI, which is researching chickpea varieties that have more than 10% higher yields and are more drought-resistant.

Chickpea is staple crop in India, but its harvest is threatened by climate change, said Gates. He said that higher temperatures due to climate change could reduce chickpea yield by as much as 70 percent, putting lives and livelihoods at risk.

“India is on the frontlines of climate change. But the progress it has made on health will make its people more resilient and provide helpful insights for how to tackle other major challenges,” wrote Gates, whose foundation has done extensive work in India.

He added that he was going to be in India next week to see firsthand the work being done by entrepreneurs and innovators here. “Like every other country on the planet, India has limited resources. But it has shown us how the world can still make progress in spite of that constraint,” he concluded.