India- Between PM Aspirants and Entrepreneurs
Posted : March 16, 2009 at 7:15 pm [IST]
With Election 2009 so close, most of the journalists are busy in helping Indian voters to make the decisions in the interest of the nation. The extra shrewd and ambitious political leaders, even though in the age recommended for ’sanyas’ by the scripture or too immature to lead this big country are doing everything in their power to be the king or kingmaker. As a voter and senior citizen, I am confused and agonized, as the media has only the stories of fragmenting Pakistan or the weakening national parties to report or the highly repulsive political faces to show on the small screens. None provide any hope, be that Mayavati, Mulayam, Mamta, Sharads, Lal Krishna or Man Mohan. The younger generation in politics in India has totally failed the people. Has it been due to lack of grassroots in-party democratic system or because of the general standard of the voters and their preference till date?
Further, the global meltdown enveloping India into recessionary condition has made my plan regarding my property at Salt Lake stuck. It has taken away some of my peace. It is difficult time to find a subject of interest to talk about. However, I got a good one in the special issue on entrepreneurship in the last issue of ‘The Economist’. While Vir Sanghvi and many others vent their views on the prospective PM, I have kept searching the India and Indian heroes in the special report on entrepreneurship ‘Global Heroes‘ in ‘The Economist’ .
IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India.
The report refers to a novel.
Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”
The oversubscribed conference in Bangalore was arranged by The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), that was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of Indian transplants who wanted to promote entrepreneurship through mentoring, networking and education.The leading lights at the meeting, were Gururaj Deshpande and Suren Dutia, who live, respectively, in Massachusetts and California and the star speaker was Wipro’s Mr Premji, who was educated at Stanford. One of the most popular gurus, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.
And then who is an entrepreneur?
For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. This special report will use the word in a narrower sense to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem.
Peter Drucker, the distinguished management guru, defined the entrepreneur as somebody who “upsets and disorganises”: “Entrepreneurs innovate,” he said. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.”
William Baumol, one of the leading economists, describes the entrepreneur as “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”.
Howard Stevenson, the champion of the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”
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The report on the ‘entrepreneurs of India and China‘ starts with a story by Gurucharandas about stopping at a roadside café in southern India and chatting to a 14-year-old boy who was waiting at tables. The boy said that he needed the money to pay for computer lessons. His ultimate ambition was to run a computer company just like his hero, Bilgay, the richest man in the world. He may have got the name slightly wrong, but the sentiment was spot on.
As compliments to India entrepreneurs, the report concludes:
Over the past couple of decades India has been transformed from a licence Raj into a land of uncaged entrepreneurs. Everybody knows about companies like Infosys, but there is more to Indian entrepreneurialism than software. Bollywood produces 1,000 films a year that are watched by 3.6 billion people (the figures for Hollywood are 700 and 2.6 billion). The Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital, founded by Devi Shetty on the outskirts of Bangalore, is turning heart surgery into a Wal-Mart-like business. Kingfisher beer is popular wherever spicy curries are eaten. The global slowdown will no doubt pose serious problems for India. But the country’s mood has changed fundamentally since the government began opening up the economy in 1991: fatalism has been replaced by can-do optimism.
And on the NRIs too have facilitated the entrepreneurship in India. “Rajat Gupta, a former head of McKinsey, did as much as anybody to create the Indian Business School in Hyderabad. Gururaj Deshpande, who sold his company, Cascade Communications, to Ascend for $3.7 billion, is a ubiquitous cheerleader for entrepreneurialism.”
However, I don’t feel like agreeing to some conclusions of the report, such as this one: “In 2003-05 some 5,000 tech-savvy Indians with more than five years’ experience of working in America returned to India. Such people have helped to fill some of the skills gaps created by the country’s recent boom. They have also reinforced India’s already numerous links with high-tech America.” The talent level in technocrats in India is pretty high and may be higher with similar years of experiences.
And Indians have proven themselves entrepreneurs of world class and have been globally recognized today.
Why should I bother about ghoda (old man of Karnataka) and elephant (queen of UP) till I keep myself busy learning about the great heroes who will create a great India even if the politicians fail? However, if the people of India elect the right candidates in Election 2009, the process of entrepreneurship may get expanded to remove the get rid of the curse of poverty for millions of Indian faster.
- Indra
Category: Industry/Management |
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