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I wouldn’t bet against current set of Indian entrepreneurs: Saurine Doshi

Satish John — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:28:00 GMT

Mumbai: Saurine Doshi, 44, took over the reins of AT Kearney Ltd’s India operations in August. For some two years, the Indian unit, the country’s third largest management consulting firm, was led by John Kurtz, managing director, Southeast Asia, from Indonesia.

Growth curve: Saurine Doshi says consolidation among Indian companies will ensure that the size of companies will become larger and the kind of money being spent on hiring services will go up. Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint.

Doshi, an experienced AT Kearney hand from the US, was sent to India three years ago to set up two new verticals—communications and high technology, and consumer industries and retail.

Doshi says AT Kearney’s Indian operations are nearly sold out in terms of time slots, and is candid enough to add that the firm has on occasions walked away from “surprising” price points that the competition grabbed later. Edited excerpts from an interview:

How do you look back at your Indian stint of three years?

It’s been an exciting three years. It’s good to be a part of a marketplace which is growing as (rapidly as) India. During this period, we built our business across a variety of business verticals, including telecom, IT services, consumer and retail.

Can you talk to us about your firm’s strengths in specific areas?

Globally, we focus on two or three key industries. Consumer and retail, telecommunications and technology, process industries and energy sectors, and automotive and discreet manufacturing. So globally, 85-90% of our businesses come from those four verticals.

What we have done in India is to pretty much replicate that model. When I moved to India the biggest industry by far for AT Kearney was really the process and energy industry. But my own background has been in the consumer and retail space and telecom and energy.

The growth in the Indian market has been phenomenal in the past three or four years.

It coincided well. So now we have a robust positioning in these two sectors and I came here and set up a practice. One is consumer and retail practice and telecom and IT practice, and so we have really built those two practices in the last three or four years.

How do you see your industry growing?

Overall, we see the consulting industry growing at a healthy pace of 15-20% a year in India. It is probably a $250-300 million marketplace. It will evolve in the next four-five years.

Recently, Tata, through a subsidiary, tied up with German consulting firm Roland Berger. Do you think such moves by Indian companies will put independent firms like yours at a disadvantage?

What Tatas are doing is not new in the global market. Many of the large Fortune 500 companies have their own internal strategic groups. And it’s a good thing for companies to do internally and they should rely on external help only if they believe there’s certain amount of expertise or cross industry perspective that is on offer.

How’s the Indian market growing?

(The) Indian consulting industry follows the same development path that was followed by the western mature markets. The domestic market is growing by 15-20%. In some of the geographies the consulting industry is actually shrinking. It will probably grow at 2-3%.

In some of the emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil, this type of growth rates on an average are very doable. When the economy itself is growing at 7.5-8% on a real basis, add inflation to it then you have 15-20%.

Consolidation among Indian companies will ensure that the size of the companies will become larger. And as a result, the penetration or the kind of money being spent on hiring services will go up. The deepening and broadening of Indian companies will need more managerial expertise.

Are the problems facing Indian companies similar to what is faced by companies elsewhere?

Yes and no. I would say that in 2005-2008 most Indian companies were focused on growth. Majority of the work for consulting industry was to support these growth initiatives.

In western Europe and North America it meant very significant cost cutting, and whereas in India they were more conscious of their growth strategies and more interested in efficiency improvements.

There is talk about consulting firms getting desperate and undercutting each other’s fees.

We do see some surprising price points in the market place in some competitive situations. When we see that, we tend to walk away. In some months, we’ll be sold out (in terms of time slots) and so we have not felt the need to make any changes in our price points.

But yeah, in downturns what one does see is probably companies with lower market shares do get impacted more and some of them decide to do work at a discounted work structure. In downturns, at times, these are good decisions because if you work with a client and they have a particular need and a firm adjusts to their price points they earn their client’s loyalty.

Have you had to walk away from such situations?

It happens quite often. Just now (before Mint met Doshi), we were looking at a global firm planning an entry into India. The client has come back to us and admitted we have the best proposal, but they added we were double in price. They want us to reduce the price by 50% and they promised to give us the order on the spot. At best we could offer 10-15% lower. Otherwise it is an infeasible proposition.

I don’t have a black and white answer. Many times firms try to build capabilities and many times you are operating from strength because we know that nobody has our capability. But such surprising pricing phenomena are rare. Thankfully, that’s coming to an end.

There are also reports about downsizing by consulting firms.

Difficult to say. We have all heard rumours. But as far as AT Kearney goes, we’ve always increased the number of people we have had from September of last year to today.

We now have 110-115 consultants. Last year, we had 80 thereabouts. We have 7-8% of the market...probably we are No. 3 in the marketplace in terms of high value consulting and we would love to become one of the top two players in the next three-four years.

Many consultants believe Indian conglomerates are a relic of the licence raj.

Very candidly, if you think of the last 10 years and draw an analogy with the US, the last 10 years are equivalent to the US barons, where the large names got traded, like the Rockefellers, etc. I think we have brilliant entrepreneurs in India who have the capability to better any of the conventional wisdom... They also know that they cannot do it single-handedly. Some of them have professional people and have different operating models.

I think for the foreseeable future, conglomerates will continue to dominate in many sectors. Look at Japan. They have “keiretsus”. It is nothing other than what we call conglomerates. Except that the operating structure for Japanese keiretsus is hidden. Most successful companies in the world are in Japan. I would rather bet on the current set of Indian entrepreneurs than against them.

Do you expect an imminent shake-out in the Indian aviation sector?

We don’t have a silver bullet remedy. Our nationalized airline needs to get their act together. I think as far has private airlines go, Jet Airways or Kingfisher Airlines go, they have one of most successful service models in the industry.

We can look forward to cost reduction or belt tightening by airlines. But there is only so much an airline can do... I think you’ll see end-to-end efficiencies enhanced, greater cooperation and collaborations.

Nothing keeps China’s ‘Market Wu’ from speaking his mind

David Barboza / NYT — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:34:00 GMT

Beijing: At 79, Wu Jinglian is considered China’s most famous economist.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he was an adviser to China’s leaders, including Deng Xiaoping. He helped push through some of this country’s earliest market reforms, paving the way for China’s spectacular rise and earning him the nickname “Market Wu”.

Testing the limits: Wu’s pro-market ideas have influenced a generation of younger economists who now hold senior government posts. Lucas Shcifres / Bloomberg.

Last year, China’s state-controlled media slapped him with a new moniker: spy.

Wu has not been interrogated, charged or imprisoned. But the fact that a state newspaper, The People’s Daily, among others, was allowed to publish Internet rumours alleging that he had been detained on suspicions of being a spy for the US hints that he is annoying some very important people in the government.

He denied the allegations, and soon after they were published, China’s cabinet denied that an investigation was under way.

But in a country that often jails critics, Wu seems to be testing the limits of what Beijing deems permissible. While many economists argue that China’s growth model is flawed, rarely does a prominent Chinese figure, in the government or out, speak with such candour about the flaws he sees in China’s leadership.

Wu—who still holds a research post at an institute affiliated with the State Council, China’s cabinet—has white hair and an amiable face, and he appears frail. But his assessments are often harsh. In books, speeches, interviews and television appearances, he warns that conservative hardliners in the Communist Party have gained influence in the government and are trying to dismantle the market reforms he helped formulate.

He complains that business tycoons and corrupt officials have hijacked the economy and manipulated it for their own ends, a system he calls crony capitalism. He has even called on Beijing to establish a British-style democracy, arguing that political reform is inevitable.

Provocative statements have made him a kind of dissident economist here, and showed the sharp debates behind the scenes, at the highest levels of the Communist Party, about the direction of China’s half-market, half-socialist economy. In many ways, it is a continuation of the debate that has been raging for three decades: What role should the government play in China’s hybrid economy?

Wu says the spy rumours were “dirty tricks” employed by his critics to discredit him.

“I have two enemies,” he said in a recent interview. “The crony capitalists and the Maoists. They will use any means to attack me.”

Nevertheless, some analysts believe that Wu’s critiques are aiding one government faction in a power struggle with another, and that he is protected.

His pro-market ideas have influenced a generation of younger economists who now hold senior government posts, including Zhou Xiaochuan, the leader of China’s central bank, and Lou Jiwei, chairman of the country’s huge sovereign wealth fund.

“He is like the father of economics here,” says Laurence Brahm, who wrote several books about China’s reform period. “What he said was the blueprint for reform.”

Critics say Wu’s influence on government is waning. (They note that he is not invited to weekly economics seminars held for top leaders, including Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.)

Given this, some people say, Wu is courting danger by speaking out.

“You have to remember, China is a dictatorship,” says Victor Shih, a professor of political science at Northwestern University. “If they want to shut him up, they can.”

Given the risks, it’s hard not to wonder why one of the architects of China’s reforms has turned so negative, so angry and so defiant.

Wu’s personality and tumultuous life story provide some clues. Even his supporters acknowledge that he has a combative streak and describe him as a stubborn idealist whose verbal jousting skills were honed during years of hardship and political warfare.

“He always expressed his ideas in the sharpest way,” says Zhang Chunlin, a student of Wu. “He’s not diplomatic. Even at close to 80 years old, he argues with journalists.”

That he has lived such a long life would have surprised his parents, wealthy intellectuals who ran one of the country’s largest independent newspapers, in Nanjing. A sickly child with tuberculosis, he was not expected to live past the age of 1. He spent much of his youth confined to bed, reading Russian novels and the works of Lu Xun, an influential Chinese writer from the 1920s.

Mao Zedong wanted intellectuals sent to the countryside to be “re-educated”. So in 1969, virtually the entire academy was sent to Henan Province to learn to farm and to build houses in remote villages. “When I left, I was prepared never to return home again,” Wu says solemnly. “We were told we’d farm for the rest of our lives.” Wu says the hardships included sessions in which he was denounced as an anti-Maoist. When pressed to confess, or to denounce others, he says he refused, and then was beaten and placed in solitary confinement.

This didn’t shake his faith in socialism, but he began to distrust the people around Mao who were calling believers like him enemies of the people.

His only solace, he later said, was his friendship with a scholar named Gu Zhun, who was an early critic of central planning, and an advocate of market reform. Gu encouraged him to learn English and to explore the outside world, which Gu said was the only hope for China to develop.

After the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, Wu says he began to see that Mao’s economic policies had brought the country to the brink of collapse.

In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping began to press ahead with bold reforms aimed at opening up the country, Wu was heavily influenced by the thought and advice of his colleague Gu, who had died in 1974. He learned English, and in 1983 went to Yale as a visiting scholar. Much of his time there was spent studying modern economic theory.

Wu returned to Beijing in 1984, just as China’s economic reforms were gathering momentum under Zhao Ziyang, the party leader and chief economic planner.

That year, Wu says he helped Ma Hong, a top government adviser, draft a paper that defined the country’s shift from a planned to a market economy. “This was a very important turning point for China’s economy,” he says.

The reforms, though, fuelled strong growth and are widely credited with changing the course of the nation.

But by the late 1980s the reforms also opened the doors to corruption and soaring inflation, feeding public anger that contributed to the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Zhao was removed from office just ahead of the bloody assault on the students and the campaign against dissent and “liberalization”. The reforms stalled. Not long after, Wu and other reformers were attacked for favouring a Western-style market system. “For the first guys who advocated a market system, it was pretty dangerous,” Wu said in a recent telephone interview. He was among them, and so he was derisively branded “Market Wu”. For a time, publishers refused to sell his books.

By most measures, China’s economic transformation has been a resounding success. Anyone who travels here can see it: the change in people’s living standards, the makeover of big cities—what has come to be called China’s economic miracle.

But Wu sees the defects: a government prone to “meddling” in the marketplace; a widening income gap; inefficient monopolies; and crony capitalism. His critique sharpened considerably after Jiang Zemin stepped down as president in 2003, and Wu’s role was diminished.

In interviews, Wu says he feels compelled to speak out because conservatives and “old-style Maoists” have been gaining influence in the government since 2004. These groups, he said, are pressing for a return to central planning and placing blame for corruption and social inequality on the very market reforms he championed.

At the same time, Wu says, corrupt bureaucrats are pushing for the state to take a larger economic role so they can cash in on their positions through payoffs and bribes, as well as by steering business to allies.

“I’m not optimistic about the future,” Wu said. “The Maoists want to go back to central planning and the cronies want to get richer.”

Major growth will come from generics business

C.R. Sukumar — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Hyderabad: India’s second-largest drug maker by revenue, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd, lost its 180-day market exclusivity in the US for its copy of GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s anti-migraine drug Imitrex (sumatriptan) in August. The drug had nearly doubled Dr. Reddy’s US revenue in the June quarter.

The end of the exclusivity doesn’t bother G.V. Prasad, the firm’s vice chairman and chief executive. To compensate, the company has a new line-up of generic drugs either with potential for similar market exclusivity or limited competition. These include ulcer drug omeprazole and anti-blood clot medicine fondaparinux sodium, with a combined market potential of about $1.5billion (Rs7,300 crore). On Monday, Dr. Reddy’s launched nateglinide, its copycat version of Novartis AG’s diabetes drug Starlix, in the US.

Joining hands: Dr Reddy’s chief executive G.V. Prasad says the alliance with GlaxoSmithKline will start generating revenue from the first year.

These products and the firm’s new marketing alliance with GSK, Prasad said, will keep Dr. Reddy’s on its 25% growth path as it aims for revenue of $3 billion by fiscal 2013, Prasad said. Edited excerpts:

There was speculation last week that foreign drug companies are in talks with the promoters of Dr Reddy’s to buy their stake.

No. It is just market speculation. The promoters do not have any intension of diluting their stake in the company.

By when do you see the GSK alliance reaching its potential?

We already have identified the products. In some five-six countries we have already started working with GSK. We will have revenues from the alliance from this year itself. But for it to become a meaningful portion of our revenues, it will take two years.

What revenues are you expecting from the alliance?

We are not sharing the details on expected revenues from the alliance but I can say that it is significant enough for us to announce it in a big way.

How about the margins?

It depends on the country. (But) the margins will be comparable to our branded generics business.

Will you include biosimilars—off-patent versions of biopharmaceutical drugs—in the GSK alliance?

It is likely to be included but it is not confirmed as yet. We are open to joining hands with GSK for biosimilars for markets where we do not have direct presence. We are talking to partners in one or two countries. Right now, we have only two products in biosimilars. For biosimilars to become a meaningful part of our revenues, it will be 2015.

What new businesses are you building to achieve your target of $3 billion revenue by fiscal 2013?

The $3-billion target is not based on new businesses but on the existing businesses—primarily from growth in our global generics business. We have three businesses: pharmaceutical services and active ingredients, global generics, and proprietary products. The pharmaceutical services and active ingredients is about $400 million and is growing at 10-12% and that growth trajectory will go on.

But the major growth will come from our global generics business. Last year, we focused down on five major markets—India, Russia, UK, Germany and US. By focusing on few markets but large enough markets which have headroom for growth, we can reach the $3-billion target by fiscal 2013.

Which are the key markets out of these five major markets that you think would help you more in achieving the target?

I think the US will be the primary driver of growth. It is a large market where we had invested heavily, built a large organization, built huge R&D efforts and we had acquired facilities in the US. The combination of all these efforts should give us significant part of the revenues from the US.

The market is apprehensive that with the sumatriptan exclusivity ended, Dr. Reddys will tread back to its historical revenue and profitability levels from the second quarter.

No. We have plans for significant launches. We have a number of products which will offset the sumatriptan revenues. Omeprazole OTC (over-the-counter) is the most near-term one. After that, we have a number of other products lined up, the details of which we are not sharing now.

We have a product pipeline wherein in the next three-four years, every year we will have either 180-day exclusivity product or other exclusivity via technology or something.

What kind of revenue opportunities do you see in these product?

I can only say that each of these products will have revenue opportunity of $100 million upwards.

Can you elaborate on the time schedules for these launches?

We expect to launch omeprazole next quarter. But in the case of fondaparinux sodium, we are waiting for approvals. It is pending with the USFDA (US Food and Drug Administration) for approvals and we cannot predict when we will get approvals.

What kind of revenues do you expect from these two products?

I can only say that they will be very significant. The current market for branded fondaparinux is some $400 million and the omeprazole branded market is close to a little more than $1 billion.

What are you doing to turn your German business Betapharm (Arzneimittel GmbH) profitable?

What happened in Betapharm is the market has turned from being a doctor-driven market to insurer-driven market. First of all, it calls for bringing the costs down, which we have done. Once the costs are down, I think we have to focus on returning growth into the market, which means adding larger number of products to our pipeline, increasing the market share of our existing products and improving on our ability to compete in tenders...The results will take some more time, may be a year or two years.

Do you regret acquiring Betapharm?

In hindsight, I think if we knew that the market was going to be so commoditized, may be we would not have acquired it. But we still feel that it is an opportunity to turn it around and create value.

Dr. Reddy’s was aiming to become a tier-I player in the US from the current tier-II status (implying an increase in annual revenue to $1 billion from about $400 million) over the next few years. How do you plan to achieve this?

We are significantly focused on that market. We are reorienting our supply chain; we are increasing our product breadth, we are investing in our technology platforms. We are also looking at improving service levels to our customers through coordinated supply chain. We are trying to make the entire process of supply chain high automated that include products going from here to US, putting them in warehouses and shipping to the customer, using information technology and all of that so that the customer gets high degree of confidence. And the product portfolio should help us grow in that market.

It should take three to five years for us to enter the tier-I segment from the current tier-II segment. What are your expectations for proprietary products?

We expect the proprietary products business to start contributing post-2013 and driving growth from that point onwards. While $3 billion is an interim target, we expect to continue our growth trajectory on top of that through our efforts in proprietary products, which include drug discovery, differentiated formulations and biosimilars for the regulated markets.

It is difficult to say on the revenue expectations from proprietary products since this business today doesn’t contribute anything in revenues or very little. But over a period of time, maybe 5-10 years, they should become a very meaningful portion of our market cap and also our revenues. They should contribute some 25-30% to revenues over the next 5-10 years.

Reuters contributed to this story.

A billionaire named Buffett

Graham Bowley / NYT — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Warren E. Buffett has two cardinal rules of investing. Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1.

Well, a lot of old rules got trashed when the financial crisis struck—even for the Oracle of Omaha.

Blindsided? Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett. On paper, he personally lost an estimated $25 billion in the financial panic of 2008. Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg.

At 79, Buffett is coming off the worst year of his long, storied career. On paper, he personally lost an estimated $25 billion (around Rs1.22 trillion) in the financial panic of 2008, enough to cost him his title as the world’s richest man. (His friend and sometime bridge partner, Bill Gates, holds that honour, according to Forbes.)

And yet few people on or off Wall Street have capitalized on this crisis as deftly as Buffett. After counselling Washington to rescue the nation’s financial industry and publicly urging Americans to buy stocks as the markets reeled, in he swooped. Buffett positioned himself to profit from the market mayhem—as well as all those taxpayer-financed bailouts—and thus secure his legacy as one of the greatest investors of all time.

When so many others were running scared last autumn, Buffett invested billions in Goldman Sachs—and got a far better deal than Washington. He then staked billions more on General Electric Co. While taxpayers never bailed out Buffett, they did bail out some of his stock picks. Goldman, American Express, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp—all of them got public bailouts that ultimately benefited private shareholders such as Buffett.

If Buffett picked well—and, so far, it looks as if he did—his payoff could be enormous. But now, only a year after the crisis struck, he seems to be worrying that the broader stock market might falter again. After boldly buying when so many were selling assets, his conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., is pulling back, buying fewer stocks while investing in corporate and government debt. And Buffett is warning that the economy, though on the mend, remains deeply troubled.

“We are not out of problems yet,” Buffett said last week in an interview, in which he reflected on the lessons of the last 12 months. “We have got to get the sputtering economy back so it is functioning as it should be.”

Still, Buffett hardly sounded shell-shocked in the wake of what he once called the financial equivalent of Pearl Harbour. (An estimated net worth of $37 billion would be a balm to anyone’s psyche.)

“It has been an incredibly interesting period in the last year and a half. Just the drama,” Buffett said. “Watching the movie has been fun, and occasionally participating has been fun too, though not in what it has done to people’s lives.”

Investors big and small hang on Buffett’s pronouncements, and with good reason: if you had invested $1,000 in the stock of Berkshire in 1965, you would have amassed millions of dollars by 2007.

Despite that formidable record, the financial crisis dealt him a stinging blow. While he has not changed his value-oriented approach to investing—he says he likes to buy quality merchandise, whether socks or stocks, at bargain prices—Buffettologists wonder what will define the final chapters of his celebrated career.

For the moment, Buffett seems to be retrenching a bit. Like so many people, he was blindsided by the blow-up in the housing market and the recession that followed, which hammered his holdings of financial and consumer-related companies. He readily concedes he made his share of mistakes. Among his blunders: investing in an energy company around the time oil prices peaked, and in two Irish banks even as that country’s financial system trembled.

Buffett declined to predict the short-run course of the stock market. But corporate data from Berkshire shows his company was selling more stocks than it was buying by the end of the second quarter, according to Bloomberg News. Its spending on stocks fell to the lowest level in more than five years, although the company is still deftly picking up shares in some companies and buying corporate and government debt.

Among the stocks Buffett has been selling lately is Moody’s, the granddaddy of the much-maligned credit ratings industry. Berkshire, Moody’s largest shareholder, said last week that it had reduced its stake by 2%.

The shift in Berkshire’s investments suggests Buffett is starting to worry, said Alice Schroeder, the author of The Snowball, a biography of Buffett.

But Schroeder said Buffett was also growing anxious about how he would be remembered. He wants to remain relevant in the twilight of his career, she said, and is taking a more prominent role on the public stage. That shift means ordinary investors are getting a chance to hear more of his sage advice, but it also carries some risk.

“Before, he always made sure to dole out the wisdom with an eyedropper,” Schroeder said. In the past, Buffett “said it was a mistake to believe that if you are an expert in one area that people will listen to you in others,” she said.

Whatever his recent missteps, many people, from President Obama down, listen to what Buffett has to say. He is important in his own right as a billionaire businessman but also because millions of ordinary investors follow his homespun aphorisms, copy his investing strategies and await his pronouncements on the markets.

Buffett refused to be drawn out on where stocks are headed, but he warned about the dangers of investing with borrowed money, or leverage, which proved disastrous when the crisis hit.

As for regrets, he has a few. His timing was bad, he concedes. He should have sold stocks sooner, before the markets tumbled. Then he served up a Buffettism that any investor might heed.

Asked if anything was keeping him awake at night, he said there was not. “If it’s going to keep me awake at night,” Buffett said, “I am not going to go there.”

Comparing a country to a brand is only a metaphor

Priyanka Mehra — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:07:00 GMT

New Delhi: He specializes in so-called nation branding, which conveys the sense of a country’s reputation and can have an effect on the outcome of its business, trade and tourism efforts, apart from international diplomatic and cultural ties. Simon Anholt has since 1996 been working with governments to help them plan policies, strategies and investments that lead countries towards an improved profile.

Anholt is a member of the UK government’s Public Diplomacy Board and works as an independent adviser to 20 other national, regional and city governments on brand strategy and public diplomacy. In 2005, he developed the Nation Brand Index, a report that measures perceptions among 50 countries based on influencers such as exports, governance, culture, people, tourism, investment and immigration. Anholt was in New Delhi on Thursday to address a seminar on nation branding. Edited excerpts from the seminar and an interview with him:

Studying perception: Anholt says it is important to know that a brand is not the message but the context in which the brand is received which is why, even for a nation, the way it is perceived makes a difference. Rajkumar / Mint

What is nation branding?

A nation’s brand is a way of signifying a country’s reputation, and it is important to make sure the reputation is strong because everything the country does is then easier—whether it’s exporting products where the Made in India label becomes a premium, or whether it’s the political and cultural relations the country forms with other nations, and even for the people who come from a country with a good reputation, then find it easier to get jobs, study abroad and even get married.

Is it fair to compare the way companies brands their product, and a nation manages its reputation?

Comparing a country to a brand is only a metaphor and nothing more than that. A nation is not a product but it does have a reputation that needs to be managed carefully and that is important. While branding is always associated with a company making people buy stuff, when it is applied to a nation, it is no different. We live in a globalized world where we no longer compete locally. Suddenly everybody woke up in the 80s and found that the world had changed. We compete for products globally, we even compete for destinations across the world. In this situation you don’t know your customer and your customer doesn’t know you but your product has a reputation that is formed by the country of its origin.

In a paper I wrote, I described an imaginary situation where a DVD player on the shelf has the same price and same design and same characteristics and no brand name but while one said it was made in Guatemala, the other was made in Japan. The DVD player that a customer would choose is the one from Japan because of the perception or myth that Japan is a credible manufacturer of electronic items. The customer would choose the same DVD player from Japan even it was 20% costlier. It is important to know that a brand is not the message but the context in which the brand is received which is why even for a nation, the way it is perceived makes a difference to the success of its business, trade, political relations and to its people.

Can the efforts made by countries to brand themselves, like the Incredible India campaign, be measured?

It is measurable, though it’s not easy to measure. One can become obsessed about expecting immediate results but it is not useful because 90% of a country’s reputation is beyond the control of a country. Perceptions have been created over generations and it takes generations to alter it even slightly, but 10% is something that can be managed and that is what government initiatives usually try to do. But a government is spending taxpayers’ money, so it is essential that it is measurable, which is what the Nation Brand Index (NBI) tries to do, not by measuring the performance of nations that try to change themselves because that just doesn’t show up. But the purpose of the NBI is to find out what ordinary people around the world think or believe about other countries. The idea for the NBI came about when I realized that there were a lot of surveys that looked at the reality surrounding countries but none that studied perceptions.

What does the NBI say about how India is being perceived by other nations?

In 2008, India came in 27th among the 50 nations, Germany was number one, China was 28. In the six areas that influence perceptions of a country, which include exports, governance, culture, people, tourism and immigration and investment, India scored well in most areas except in governance. (As a) country that competes directly with China, (India) has a competitive edge over China where people are concerned and this is a crucial advantage because it is the human factor we are talking about here. When you talk to most governments on what they are proud of, they will talk of products, services, tourist destinations, investments but the one thing they don’t talk about is people, and it is this that makes the reputation of a country the strongest because people like to put a face to a nation because a country is nothing but the genius of the people.

If you were given the task to re-brand India, where would you start?

The country is one of the oldest brands. India is undergoing rapid economic growth and is in touch with other countries now more than ever and this will make its image grow extensively right from its food, culture, people and as a tourist destination.

Notwithstanding the country’s vast economic disparities, people are doing much better and this is being projected to other nations. I don’t see a need for rebranding India at the moment but I do see a sense in protecting the brand as it is today. As I see Brand India, the train has left the station and is running rapidly in the right direction.

Govt recalls two directors from Maytas Infra board

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:06:00 GMT

New Delhi: The government on Friday recalled two nominee directors, K. Ramalingam and O. P. Vaish, from the board of Maytas Infra which was handed over to infrastructure major IL&FS on Monday.

Two other government nominees, Ved Jain and Anil Agarwal, will, however, continue on the board of the company.

“We have to keep two directors on board (of Maytas Infra) to inspire confidence in the shareholders and the market,” corporate affairs minister Salman Khurshid told reporters.

The government decided to withdraw its two nominees from the Maytas Infra board following the Company Law Board (CLB) order handing over the reins of Maytas Infra, promoted by kins of disgraced founder of Saytam, R. Ramalinga Raju, to IL&FS.

The CLB also allowed the IL&FS, as a new promoter, to appoint four directors, including chairman, on the board of the company.

The government, pursuant to an earlier CLB order in March, had appointed Ramalingam, Jain, Vaish and Agarwal on the Maytas Infra board to revive the company. Ramalingam had since functioned as chairman of the company.

Surendra Malik | He prepared an access system which facilitates discovery of law

Malathi Nayak — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:17:00 GMT

Lucknow: Even as a teenager, Surendra Malik knew that the family legal publishing business was where he would would end up.

“My father and uncle built this institution brick by brick,” he says. “Interaction with lawyers, barristers, judges, professors suited their temperament. From then on, it was a great inspiration for me to read and learn about the law and that became part of the family culture.”

Malik is talking about the Eastern Book Co., which his father and uncle jointly set up in 1942. Today, Malik’s company is still little known, at least outside the profession, but is an essential building block of India’s legal landscape.

It is thanks to Malik that legal practitioners have easy access to case law in India, dating back to 1950 as well as judgements of the Privy Council, the apex court during British rule. In short, 61-year-old Malik is the person responsible for the rows of tan coloured volumes of Supreme Court cases that invariably line up any self-respecting lawyer or judge’s chambers.

Expert insight: Eastern Book Co.’s Surendra Malik. His company offers a set of 264 volumes of the reports of Supreme Court rulings with more than 30,000 judgements from 1969. (Harikrishna Katragaddda/Mint)

The concept first took root when Malik was doing an undergraduate programme at the Law Faculty of Delhi University. In the three years (1966-69) Malik noticed that neither students nor teachers had access to case law. Instead, the focus was on studying the law as it existed without the advantage of studying how it had been practised.

At the same time, his professors had begun to experiment with teaching law based on actual court judgements, recalls Malik. Soon, he was assisting teachers in preparing study material on case law as there was nothing readily available.

“After three years of analysing Supreme Court judgements, I learnt how to analyse and find the law,” notes Malik.

Malik then left for New York to complete his Master’s in law from Columbia University.

On this return, he found lawyers were cyclostyling Supreme Court orders and directions while maintaining personal registers of names and numbers of past cases to aid their legal research.

Quickly passing up an opportunity to join the profession as a practising lawyer, Malik decided to immerse himself in the family business and began compiling and editing books, trademarked as Supreme Court Cases.

“There were some publishing houses that were reporting court judgements but they were a year or two late,” explains Malik. At the same time, he discovered that new subjects of study were emerging in law. For instance, when the legislature created numerous laws, following pro-labour measures and land reforms, it led to an addition of new terms in the legal lexicon. Malik says he also realized that there was lack of uniformity in the index system of the journals and the cases were classified in a haphazard manner, making legal research complicated and time consuming.

“I studied other existing systems from other publications like All India Reporter, Income Tax Reporter and Madras Law Journal—they are longstanding journals,” he says. “New and modern elements of the law had not come in. I wanted to prepare an access system, which can facilitate the discovery of law.”

So, starting in 1971, Malik spent the next 20 years of his life putting together a digest of reports, which contain only the extract of the judgement of each and every Supreme Court judgement from 1950 through 1971. He classified them alphabetically under different headings—usually non-statutory and statutory topics.

That entailed weeding out typographical and grammatical errors in the original judgements, preparing headnotes and footnotes to simplify research and adding cross references to other journals that have also reported the same case.

It is another matter that it also gave him a bird’s eye view of the legal history of a young democracy as it emerged from two centuries of colonial rule. Some of them, as he recalled, were the cases in the 50s and 60s when the Supreme Court laid emphasis on the value of the freedom of the press, the cases during the emergency in 1975 when Indira Gandhi attempted to take on the judiciary and curb the freedom of the press and the mantra of judicial activism that followed a few years later, wherein the judiciary enlarged its jurisdiction and intervened in matters of public interest.

Reminiscing about the India he returned to, he talks of the atmosphere that was rife with political and judicial controversy when Gandhi was in power and “socialism was the main theme.”

Landmark judgements, like the one that abolished privy purses and brought about the nationalization of banks, and cases where the Parliament and judiciary were seen fighting for centre stage were all handed down at the time.

Today, Eastern offers a set of 264 volumes of the reports of Supreme Court judgements, with more than 30,000 judgements from 1969. Assisting Malik is is a team of 30-40 legal experts and other writers.

From the beginning, Malik kept his interaction with judges and lawyers minimal to ensure he reported the judgements objectively.

He also says he felt the need to consciously maintain disparity between his own views and those of the court. But, in a few instances, Malik did assert his opinion, as most legal writers do, through their manuscripts.

“When I have felt strongly on an issue, I have humbly put forth my view,” he says , pointing to labour law and rent control matters where he felt that social justice in favour of labourers and tenants alone sometimes resulted in injustice. “But I am not a critic of the court, I only assist the court.”

In early 1995, Eastern converted its journals into electronic form. Malik even acquired a Compaq dealership to push the concept as most lawyers weren’t using computers.

“It was a very exciting time,” he recalls. “We went around the market, introducing people to our CD-Roms and teaching them about computers. In the last 10 years lawyers have a become aware about computers. This endeavour took computers to the legal fraternity besides simplifying research.”

Additional solicitor general of India Gopal Subramaniam has known Malik professionally since he is on the editorial board of the Supreme Court cases as well as personally. “I have known Mr. Malik through my father, even before I joined legal practice,” he says, describing Malik as an “indefatigable worker” who carries himself with an unassuming demeanour.

“Mr. Malik has truly mastered the art of reading and reporting judgements. Although the official publication of the Supreme Court cases is another publication called the Supreme Court Reporter, it is the Supreme Court Cases that practitioners prefer to use in courts for ready reference.”

Eastern’s books for law students are also very popular and include the 20th edition Industrial Laws by Malik’s father, P.L. Malik. The book has been in print for the past 50 years and is one of the oldest legal books in India.

“Our student books are on a no-profit, no-loss” basis, says Malik. “We have to think of students in smaller towns.”

These days, Malik’s two sons and nephews, all educated in either law or business management, work at Eastern. Sitting in his office, Malik points out photographs of his father and uncle, both of whom worked until they were 80 years old. What about his own retirement plans: “I am not doing a job,” he says with a smile.

Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

S S Sivakumar | He changed the economics of water, his machines make it

John Samuel Raja D. — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:20:00 GMT

He hated capitalism and capitalists, but four decades after rejecting a corporate career, S.S. Sivakumar, now 61, has become a capitalist himself.

Only, he started late. In 2004, Sivakumar, then a professor of economics at the University of Madras, sought an early retirement that was granted.

Soon after, he founded Akash Ganga International (AGI), a company that makes water from, well, thin air.

All his life, Sivakumar, who looks an unlikely capitalist in his casual trousers, shirt, and bushy white moustache, has been interested in understanding what makes some people rich, and others poor.

At the Delhi School of Economics, where he completed his doctorate, his thesis was on this subject. He studied 200 families across three generations in rural India. His conclusion: “Affluence is a matter of chance.”

S.S. Sivakumar is an economist-turned-entrepreneur. The scientific basis behind his air-to-water conversion is the heat exchange process: in this case, it involves sucking in air from the atmosphere and blowing it over cold gas, resulting in the creation of water

That discovery changed his political viewpoint. “By the time I finished the field work, the Naxalite in me died,” says Sivakumar, referring to the term used to describe a school of thought adopted by militant followers of a kind of Maoist communism.

His interest in understanding the genesis of wealth did not. In 1984, with wife Chitra, a sociologist, Sivakumar embarked on a decade-long research study on class (wealth), caste, and resources such as water and land. By the end of the study, he was convinced that water, or the absence of it, held the key.

Water plays a dominant role in Indian politics and economics. Agriculture, which accounts for 18% of the country’s gross domestic product and which is the livelihood of 60% of the population, depends on the monsoon and most states have long-running disputes with their neighbours over the sharing of river waters.

An entire economic ecosystem, comprising mineral water companies, makers of water purifiers, service providers that deliver tanker-loads of water, and installers of reverse osmosis plants, has sprung up around water.

The idea for Akash Ganga came to Sivakumar in 2004, mainly as an offshoot of his research. He bounced the idea off Prof. M.K. Sundaresan, a physicist at Carlton University, Canada. It would work, said Sundaresan, and followed up with a contribution of $13,500 (then Rs6 lakh).

The scientific basis behind Sivakumar’s air-to-water conversion is the heat exchange process: In this case, it involves sucking in air from the atmosphere and blowing it over cold gas resulting in the creation of water (in much the same way, condensate, or water, forms on the outside of the windows of a heated room in winter or an air-conditioned room in summer).

To Sivakumar, Akash Ganga, named after the tributary of the Ganga that provides water to the heavens in Hindu mythology, is more than a company; it is a mission. “I am doing this under a business format because there is no other format to take it to the people,” he says. His start-up team included his nephew T.M. Shyam Sundar, an engineer, and four others. “We taught ourselves,” recalls Sundar. “We conducted around 300 experiments in various ambient conditions.”

By mid-2004, Sivakumar and his team worked out how to make water from air. AGL invested in a modest 3,000 sq. ft manufacturing facility and started rolling out its products. Priced between Rs9,200 (for an 8-litre version) to Rs42,500 (for a 120-litre one), the machines were powered by electricity, and sold through stores that sold consumer durables such as television sets, washing machines and refrigerators. The Akash Ganga machines produced a litre of water at an average cost of Rs0.80 a litre, but, surprisingly, found little success. The company was unable to sell the product as it lacked the resources to market the product on a larger scale.

With money running low—Sivakumar had invested around Rs1 crore of his savings into the venture—AGI had to give up its manufacturing facility and move to a smaller one. It also had to prune its workforce from a peak of 52 in August 2005 to just around six now. Sivakumar is determined to make a success of the company and his perseverance has seen some 400 units of the air-to-water converter being sold until now.

Since the process of converting air to water results in a drop in temperature (one reason why some air conditioners leak water), AGI has pitched its products as a three-in-one as the company terms it: an airconditioner, water creator, and air cleanser.

J. Sivaramakrishnan, a retired State Bank of India (SBI) official residing in Chennai, uses one such which cost him Rs23,500. It produces 20 litres of water a day. “It is the purest thing available. No need to run around for water,” he says. The product isn’t without its failings: during winter, according to Sivaramakrishnan, the humidity drops, resulting in a decrease in output.

AGL is in the process of developing new products that will use alternative energy sources such as wind, sun and methane. And Sivakumar is convinced that his converters will find takers in the defence establishment. He has already sold six units with an installed capacity of 600 litres per day at the headquarters of the 25th batallion of the Madras Regiment on a trial basis, and is in talks to install a 1,000-litre unit. The Indian Army is in the market for converters of this kind and had conducted field trials on products supplied by Air Water Corp., a US multinational. “Our technology is indigenous and we can offer it to the army at a much lower cost,” says Sivakumar.

The water produced by the machines has been tested by SGS India, a third party testing agency, on various parameters such as total dissolved solids, total hardness, acidity and alkalinity, and on all parameters it easily met the requirement for potable water set out by international standard IS 10500-1991, amendment 1 & 2 for water.

Once his products succeed in the cities, Sivakumar plans to take them to India’s villages, many of which do not have easy access to potable water. They also do not have a steady supply of power, but if AGI manages to develop machines that run on solar or wind energy, it will be able to address this problem.

Producing water from air may be an idea whose time has come, especially in a country that is forever short on the precious commodity or it could be one more in a long and growing list of ideas that sound good on paper but are rarely practical—alchemy and the perpetual motion machine would both fall under this category. “He falls for any idea he likes,” says Devdutt, a retired official of the World Health Organization, whose association with Sivakumar goes back four decades. Devdutt uses only one name.

Twenty years ago, when organized retail was still unheard of in India, the TVS Group launched Stop & Shop, a chain of supermarkets. Sivakumar thought there was an opportunity to supply fresh produce to the chain and banded a group of farmers into a loose co-operative that would supply vegetables, sorted and packed in convenient 500g packs.

The failure of that chain stopped that experiment. With Akash Ganga, the stakes are higher—clean water for all—and Sivakumar is determined to succeed.

Vidyadhar Damodar Kamat | Preserving the memories and passion of the Hindi film industry

Sanjukta Sharma — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:21:00 GMT

A small, two-room apartment houses India’s largest archive of images from and about the Hindi film industry. More than 100,000 images and negatives, neatly tucked into butter paper envelopes, and arranged in paper boxes, lie stacked on the floors. The labelling in the boxes doesn’t conform to any logical sequence. Like most things old, Kamat Foto Flash largely runs on fuzzy logic.

The library doesn’t run on any archiving software, yet, if you ask the family for any obscure image from a film, they’re likely to bring the originals out in less than five minutes. The only form of technology here is a hi-tech scanning machine and stacks of CDs.

Ask 53-year-old Vidyadhar Damodar Kamat, photographer and owner of Kamat Foto Flash, what his most precious piece is, and he digs the original negatives of the publicity stills of Barsaat Ki Raat—a hit film from 1960, about a passionate young poet, played by Bharat Bhushan. The poet’s search for inspiration ends with the chance meeting with a rain-soaked young woman (Madhubala) one dark, stormy night, and he falls in love.

Raised against the afternoon light, the 47-year-old negative—slightly faded, with small brown spots on it, but in good enough condition to be reproduced—reveals the original of what’s become one of the most overused black and white stills of Madhubala. A profile photograph, which Kamat’s father Damodar Kamat shot before Barsaat Ki Raat was released. Other originals of famous profile shots are that of Nadira (of Hunterwali fame) in Shree 420 and Rekha in Umrao Jaan.

Since 1945, when Damodar started Kamat Foto Flash, the family has been documenting the workings of the Hindi film industry, with their on- and off-location publicity stills— from Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam, Mother India, all of Raj Kapoor’s films and all of Amitabh Bachchan movies, to films of the 1990s and 2000s. Some of the older ones were coloured after being printed in black and white, such as Sangam.

Carrying on the legacy: Vidyadhar Damodar Kamat with daugher Neha. The archive, which was started by Vidyadhar’s father in 1945, has been selling vintage images to the media for more than a decade now

To keep up with the times, Kamat has now switched to the digital format, and has two assistants to help him out—according to him, “a too comfortable place to be in”. The archive, now run by Kamat’s da-ughter, 24-year-old Neha Kamat, has been selling vintage images to media publications for more than a decade now.

Reflecting on the changes in technology, Kamat says, “Sho-ots have become easy now. Although I love my job, I know that if I get the basics right, everything can be corrected with the right software. Earlier, it was a challenge every time, technically as well as artistically. For me, Kamat Foto is precious because along with the photographs, it also preserves the passion and meticulousness of the non-digital era.”

Of late, many film producers have approached the Kamats for reference images of old films that they have remade or are remaking—Don, Umrao Jaan and Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam are just three of them.

But, given the mass and wealth of the archive, it isn’t as commercially lucrative for the family as they believe it should have been. The importance of Kamat Foto Flash is more historical. It preserves the exciting and rich visual culture of Hindi cinema that has become a subject of academic study in the US and the UK. A few hundred images are being curated by the University of Manchester, for an exhibition at the university gallery in early 2008. An event the entire family has been invited to visit.

“I’m really looking forward to the exhibition,” says Kamat. “I waited for years to showcase the most re-presentative and best images in India first. I approached many people, galleries and film-makers to help, but here, Bollywood is such a part of our lives that we take it for granted.”

The only recognition that came Kamat’s way was when art marketer Osian’s awarded him the Osian’s 2007 Award for Excellence of Art and Design in Film. “And of course, the respect we receive from the filmindustry’s veterans because of my father. Even now, I can call up Dev saab (Anand) or Shammiji (Shammi Kapoor) if I need any help,” reminds Kamat.

For him, it was a more or less comfortable beginning. In 1974, he took over as the inhouse photographer of Kamat Foto Flash that operated out of a small ground floor space at the Famous Studio.

Damodar, a self-taught photographer, learnt the ropes of photography and printing by observing the work of a technician, Kaka Samant, in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. Kolhapur was then a culturally vibrant town, known to be the birthplace of many painters and photographers of yesteryears.

He came to Mumbai in the late 1930s and after a chance meeting with Ashok Kumar while he was working at the Bombay Talkies, India’s first public limited film company, got the break that was to make him the most sought after “action stills photographer” until the 1970s. “My father converted the living room of our tiny Dadar house to a printing room. It always used to be dark and my father would spend most of his times at home there,” Kamat recalls.

No wonder, the quick digital shoots continue to surprise him 62 years later.

For the third generation—Abhishek and Neha—Kamat Foto Flash is a family treasure they want to preserve, but not necessarily a profession they want to take up. Says Neha: “We hope to keep all the images intact for another 60 years.”

(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world, a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com )

Abhijit Barooah | In the strife-torn North-East, this entrepreneur thinks global, acts local

S. Mitra Kalita — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:49:00 GMT

He’s the son and grandson of civil servants, an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumnus with a graduate degree from a foreign university.

Really, Abhijit Barooah had all the credentials to be anywhere. But he stayed here.

The founder and managing director of Premier Cryogenics Ltd and Assam Air Products Pvt. Ltd brushes off any suggestion of altruism for starting a business in a part of the country better known for political unrest and high unemployment than entrepreneurship.

The North-East has been a lucrative opportunity, Barooah insists with a practical, no-nonsense air, thanks to public sector oil and gas companies and refineries that need the liquid nitrogen he manufactures and supplies.

If anything, he says, “We have taken advantage of the disadvantages of this region.”

By this, he refers to the remoteness of Assam and its ageing oilfields, the first in the country to begin operations. They began running dry in the mid-1980s, just around the time Barooah returned from studying at the Rochester Institute of Technology and was looking for a business idea. As a chemical engineering graduate from IIT Delhi, he understood why infusing such fields with liquid nitrogen helps trigger crude oil production. And he took note of the fact that the closest source of supply of liquid nitrogen to Assam was thousands of kilometres away in Jamshedpur in West Bengal.

The big picture: Abhijit Barooah at his natural gas factory in Guwahati. Barooah’s company supplies liquid nitrogen, medical and high-altitude oxygen, and other industrial gases to sectors from oil to hospitals.

So in 1986, a year after India deregulated the industrial gases sector, Barooah pounced. He opened a factory in Sivasagar, a town about 20km from the Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd’s eastern headquarters at Nazira, and signed a Rs15 lakh contract to supply liquid nitrogen to the public sector exploration and production firm.

Today, his businesses—Assam Air Products operates in Sivasagar and North Lakhimpur, while a factory in Guwahati under the Premier Cryogenics banner opened in 1996—generate revenues of Rs20 crore; Premier Cryogenics is publicly traded on the Guwahati and Kolkata stock exchanges and regularly pays dividends to investors.

But more importantly, to a generation of entrepreneurs looking to cash in on the sudden tide of interest and investment in the region, Barooah represents a native son who has innovated and succeeded, yet still aspires—or rather hungers—to grow and diversify.

The trait historically has been associated with outsiders who operate businesses in the region, from the Marwaris, who set up roadside shops in villages, to the Bengalis, who run sweet shops and car dealerships.

“He is doing good business, there is no doubt about it, and he has a good attitude towards entrepreneurship,” says a high-ranking Assam state government official, who did not want to be named, citing his agency’s policy on offering opinions on a private sector company. “Earlier, there was a perception that business here was only a Marwari’s cup of tea. Guwahati is now developing because of the efforts of many communities. He’s the leading example of that.”

In an interview at his spacious home in Guwahati—designed by his wife and resembling a Swiss chateau, crossed with a Shillong hillside dwelling—Barooah says he knew very early that he wanted to be his own boss. “Even as a small boy, I wanted to do something on my own,” Barooah says. “Somehow I had this intense desire that I would not serve under anybody.”

Apart from supplying liquid nitrogen, Premier Cryogenics also bottles oxygen for high altitude use by the aviation industry and the Indian Air Force. Nitrogen is also used by food processors and packagers: the puffiness in a bag of chips, for example.

More recent contracts have come from the region’s burgeoning health-care industry and hospitals in need of anaesthesia and medical oxygen.

One main resource—air—is abundant. Another—power—is not. About Rs25 lakh every month pays the electricity bill, says Premier Cryogenics general manager Tridib Borah. Borah’s resume, in some ways, resembles his boss’ mix of the East and the West.

Borah worked for the public sector Oil India Ltd and then won a fellowship to study in Houston, Texas. After that exposure, he says, he was keen to return to Assam, but not the public sector.

“Mr Barooah attracted me a lot to come here,” Borah says, above the hiss of air being compressed and pushed through tubes, some encased in large chunks of ice formed from the below-freezing—minus 196° Celsius—temperature of the nitrogen within. “He is still sticking to a place such as Guwahati, despite his qualifications.”

Barooah, 45, prides himself on combining his global exposure (he’s a former Chevening Gurukul scholar in London and takes any chance he can to attend overseas summits and meets, from dissecting chemical compounds to the business climate of the North-East) with acting locally.

“When you walk into my factory, each and every person is a local person,” says the father of three. “In other companies, 80-90% are from outside.”

(At the Guwahati factory later, Borah clarifies that one man from Orissa is part of the staff, “but even he has turned Assamese”.)

Yet, repeatedly, Barooah begs off being seen as a symbol of anything. “If you compare me to Sunil Mittal,” Barooah says, referring to the chairman of Bharti Enterprises, “I am not one-millionth of him. If you are in a place like this, it’s hard to grow,” he adds.

He pauses in a rare moment of levity: “Am I making a virtue out of my limitations now?” Then serious again: “We will stick to this place though.”

And so Barooah is expanding his empire and entering new areas—new economy ones that might seem outside the formulaic path of a chemical engineer. He’s bought a franchise of VLCC Institute of Beauty, Health and Management, and training and educational institute NIS Sparta Ltd, a division of the Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group.

He foresees a big business opportunity in training and education as the region’s youth try to catch a piece of India’s economic boom.

Assam’s unemployment rate among educated urbanites tops 14%, nearly double the comparable figure for the rest of India. And yet, Barooah sees anecdotal evidence of improvement, particularly when he is recruiting.

“Today, like any other city in India, it is hard to find and retain good people,” Barooah says. “Five years back, all the engineers were unemployed. Now they are employed. That has been a big change in this economy.”

His propensity to look on the bright side makes the other hats he wears logical. Barooah is chairman of the Assam Financial Corp., the industrial loan agency founded by the governments of Assam, Manipur, Tripura and Meghalaya, and spearheaded an effort to bring back the organization back from “the deathbed”, he says. His strategy, he says, was to infuse the agency with professionalism, encouraging its staff to run it as a business, not as a part of a government.

Barooah also chairs the state council of industry body Confederation of Indian Industry, which recently focused on the North-East during its “India@60” anniversary celebration in New York. In December, another conference is planned for non-resident Assamese to discuss investment in the state.

There are some ironies of being a son of the soil. Barooah’s first loan to fund the factory was made possible by the Assam Industrial Development Corp. Ltd. Now, Barooah sits on its board.

Paradoxically, he says, it was easier for the government to take a chance on small businesses back then. “In drafting an industrial policy for the state, we must suggest how to cut down on paperwork,” he says. “The intent is there, but implementation is where the problem is.”

He encourages fellow entrepreneurs and investors in the North-East to rid themselves of a defeatist mindset.

“Yes, there are problems here—floods, bandhs, militancy,” Barooah says, “but there are problems everywhere.”

Naresh Fernandes | Passion for Mumbai makes him take time out, go beyond the glitzy world

Rana Rosen — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:32:00 GMT

Naresh Fernandes walks around the square conference room that overlooks Mahalaxmi Racecourse. The walls are filled with all the covers of three years of Time Out Mumbai magazine. He points out his favourite issues, and one has a cover photo depicting two 70-year-old men in Gandhian attire driving a motorcycle.

Wide perspective: Time Out Mumbai editor Naresh Fernandes says: ‘I think it would be a dishonest magazine if we only talked about the glitz.’

“This was about Bombay’s role in the freedom struggle,” he says. This is one of the few cover stories he wrote alone. “I wanted to remind people that this city has a long history of being involved with struggle to make things better. That great cities become great cities because of the involvement of citizens.”

Fernandes continues around the room, highlighting cover stories about night life, restaurants, festivals and wine in one breath, and then communal tensions after the 2006 bomb blasts and infrastructure problems after the 2005 floods in the next breath. As editor of Time Out Mumbai, Fernandes’ job has clearly been a balancing act. Time Out is an international brand with magazines in 35 cities from Argentina to China, and travel guides for almost 55 destinations. In London, it calls itself the city’s listings authority. In New York, Time Out is a major city arts and entertainment magazine.

When Fernandes was hired in June 2004 by publisher Smiti Ruia of Paprika Media Pvt. Ltd, which is a content partner for Mint, he knew that he had the challenge of being true to this international entertainment brand and true to his city.

“I think it would be a dishonest magazine if we only talked about the glitz,” says the 38-year-old. “Time Outs around the world believe that they care for their cities and you couldn’t care for Bombay unless you recognized that more people live in slums than live in formal housing. And that culture is not only the domain of the elite.”

And, since its launch, Time Out Mumbai has become a home for the city’s culture to gather.

Before 10 September 2004, there were events with no place to go, no central place to be listed for all to see. Now there are dozens of pages every fortnight about events in dance, theatre, music, film, food and night life. In some senses, this was enough of an accomplishment. But Fernandes wanted more. He made it his mission to include a range of the city’s life and social issues to whatever extent possible, when the magazine could have focused easily on just bars and clubs, socialites and Bollywood.

Time Out opened up the city, giving Mumbaikers new perspectives and sub-cultures to be aware of and explore.

“I think there are forces at play to homogenize the city,” he says. “The little things that make the city unique, that is what we look out for.”

The kind of editor Fernandes has been at Time Out has its roots in his first job at The Times of India, starting in May 1990. Although he was a cub reporter there, he was thrown into covering the Mumbai riots, then the bomb blasts and then an earthquake in rural Maharashtra’s Latur. “It left a huge impression on how I have conducted journalism ever since,” he says. “It was quite awe-inspiring for someone at the beginning of their career to see how public opinion works and the role that the press plays in influencing that opinion.”

For the next 13 years, he worked across publications, jobs, formats and continents. He did a stint as a broadcast reporter and says he “could not remember the lines to say to the camera”. He worked a year as the only Mumbai correspondent for the international news wire, Associated Press, when it opened its first India office outside Delhi. He spent five years in New York, sitting on the other side of the desk, editing news stories from overseas staff of The Wall Street Journal, paying the loans he took attending Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. And then he came back to The Times of India to supervise the city desk, but he “realized things had become different”. And so he left, again, and did other projects such as volunteering at the World Social Forum.

Around that time, Fernandes wrote an article for the pilot issue of Time Out to be sent to the international headquarters in London as part of the pitch to get the licence. Divia Thani Daswani, who was helping publisher Ruia at the time, says: “The minute we read the piece we knew we had found the editor.”

Ruia met him for the first time at the first Bandra festival, watching a jazz performance at the Lands End Amphitheatre. This was a good place to strike a chord with Fernandes—a jazz enthusiast who has become known for stories he wrote on the jazz influences in mid-19th century Bollywood music. His work has inspired many, including Ramu Ramanathan who used Fernandes’ research as the basis of a play to come in November. Ruia, who was 24 at the time she decided to launch Time Out in India, says, “I think he came on board because we connected in our passion of Mumbai and our love for it.”

Fernandes has been ever beguiled by the culture and dynamics of mega cities. “Bombay has delights and problems, and I don’t think they exist on this scale anywhere else in the world”, says Fernandes who owns 80 or 90 books on this city. The Mumbaiker says that from an early age he understood the two faces of the city’s citizens: “nativism and the struggle of the immigrant”. His mother’s family is East Indian, and his grandfather used to be a farmer on the edge of Pali Hill in Mumbai suburb Bandra—the area where Fernandes still lives. His father’s family was immigrants by way of Karachi. “I feel rooted here,” he says. “It is comforting to know that I will go into the same hole that five generations of my family lay in (at) St Andrews church yard.”

And Fernandes looks after his birthplace not just through words. During August he signed a letter to the government asking that it implement the recommendations of the report of Justice B.N. Srikrishna on the 1992-1993 Mumbai riots, and helped organize a public meeting.

His job and reputation have made him the resident expert on Mumbai. “We seem to have gotten into the BBC database,” he says. “If there is a bomb blast or a flood, our phone is ringing off the hook.”

He often appears on television news roundtables, and swapped stories with friend Suketu Mehta during his writing of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. And Mint’s Friday Planner in Business of Life pages is provided by Time Out.

While his job can periodically keep him indoors from the happenings of Mumbai (he edits every word of every Time Out magazine himself), Fernandes ensures that he and his team are “swarming around the city with their eyes wide open” most of the time. “So, as my very large midriff makes clear, I do some of the restaurant reviews,” he says.

One of his favourite Time Out pieces was on the city’s Irani sweet shop in central Mumbai’s Dongri area; the shop is open for one week in March before the Irani New Year. When he went to visit after the piece was out, Fernandes says, “Bang on cue, two American tourists landed up with a couple of Time Out (magazines) in the middle of Dongri where you never see tourists.”

Another traveller and Mumbai-resident Arun Kumar says he picks up Time Out right after disembarking from the plane anywhere he goes. And in his own city, the lawyer and entrepreneur reads every issue for the reviews on food, theatre and music, and goes to at least two events a fortnight. Whether readers agree or disagree with the reviews, which they note often bash the mainstream Bollywood movies and music, most say they go to Time Out when they have free time to fill and want an infusion of the international scene.

Leonie Le Maistre, a 31-year-old from Scotland who has taught at Mumbai’s suburban Tridha School since 2005, says, “If I don’t get each edition, I feel I am going to miss something.” She recently ventured out by herself to see Danny Bhoy, a Scottish-Indian stand-up comedian.

In order for events such as these to be listed, Fernandes has the section editors make between 60 and 100 calls each to ensure listings are comprehensive and accurate. The staff take turns working on the cover story and stories about their section, be it music or art, after story ideas are long debated. He tells his team to use events to highlight aspects of the city and “interpret the changes of Bombay through the prism of a fortnight.”

He wants Time Out to bring out the city’s subcultures and its “cultural collective memory” in a fight against “the global forces that homogenize the city”. As his friend and co-editor of Bombay, Meri Jaan Jerry Pinto says, “Time Out has a piece that told us where Babu Genu was martyred. I don’t think anyone else would care about Babu Genu.” Pinto adds, “Where else do documentary films get reviewed?”

And Fernandes ensures that the reviews of all kinds are independent (as does the Time Out Group Ltd), paying for meals and looking at conflicts of interest.

“Among the earliest discussions I had with Smiti, was she wanted to know why I left The Times of India,” he says. “Lines had been blurred.”

Fernandes wanted clear editorial independence, and she supported that from the beginning.

Fernandes also ensures that the magazine stays relevant. On 14 July 2006, they were supposed to have Naseeruddin Shah on the cover, and had to put the story inside at the last minute, when that flood happened. After bringing the Rs30 Mumbai magazine to a 60,000 print run and an estimated readership of 360,000 (figures from Paprika Media), Fernandes now has new projects to also grow: a six-month-old Delhi edition and a Bangalore edition to launch early next year.

Tony Elliott, founder and chairman of Time Out Group, says, “Let me say this, I would be worried if Naresh were leaving.”

Fernandes seems set to stay, noting that no other magazine would allow him to indulge in all his obsessions.

Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we are running through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Natwar Gandhi | Washington’s Dr No: keeping a city away from bankruptcy

Rana Rosen — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:34:00 GMT

Unlike the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, the major league baseball team of America’s capital city Washington, DC has no stadium of its own. Starting in 2008, the Nationals’ $611 million (about Rs2,400 crore) stadium will sit on the Anacostia river with views of the US Capitol—the symbolic home of Congress.

Natwar Gandhi is the chief financial officer of the city of Washington, DC, who has also published two poetry books in Gujarati

When the DC city council came back to the city’s chief financial officer Natwar Gandhi to ask for more public money to build more stadium parking, the CFO’s answer was “no”. They had to find it elsewhere.

This wasn’t the first time Gandhi has given that answer. In the US capital, he is known as ‘Dr No’. The nickname coined by the local magazine, Washingtonian, has stuck as he consistently refuses to spend outside the city’s budget. His goal: keep DC away from the bankruptcy of the mid-1990s.

Gandhi holds the purse strings to the US political capital. Keeping fiscal discipline around approximately $9 billion in annual operating and capital funds is a challenge in any city, but DC is different.

The city is like a business that cannot collect money from most of itscustomers. DC provides services comparable to a state at roughly $4 billion annually, but cannot collect taxesfrom more than half of its workforce and almost half of its real estate owners. As Gandhi says, “the city is not a viable proposition.”

According to the most recent US census in 2000, every day approximately 400,000 commuters (78% of the DC workforce) pour into the city from the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia. They use the city’s roads, parks, bridges, technology and libraries, but go home and pay taxes in their own states.

“The bottom line is that two-thirds of the income that is generated in this city is not taxed in this city,” says Gandhi. “It is like saying that you go to a restaurant and one-third people pay, two-thirds people do not pay, and then everybody complains about bad food and bad service.”

It is an example he has given repeatedly to press and constituents as he explains the city’s predicament and his accomplishments in a concise 10-page presentation.

On top of the commuter straitjacket, the 10 largest private employers also don’t pay tax. Roughly 42% of the real property values are tax exempt, he says. This includes the White House, the Capitol, Georgetown University, about 375 consulates, and the World Bank.

“This is an anomaly,” he says. “Nowhere else in America, this could happen.”

Other cities in the country, such as Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta or St Louis get funds from the richer suburbs to support the heavy needs of the city through the state government.

Gandhi took on these seemingly impossible constraints and turned them around over the last decade with old-fashioned discipline and fortitude. He is considered by many to be the most powerful man in the DC city government. This month, Washingtonian named him to its Power 150 list and he is one of the members of Governing magazine’s US Public Officials of the Year for 2007.

When the city’s young mayor, Adrian Fenty, was elected in 2006, Gandhi was the first person he publicly announced as staying on board.

Since Gandhi came into the city office, he has re-engineered the tax system so citizens get refunds in 14 days or less, sued the World Bank to broaden the tax base and solidified the end of the city’s bond rating as part of the “junk” pile. But, most of all, since he took over the department in 1997 and became CFO in 2000, he brought the city to a surplus of $1.6 billion.

Gandhi imposes the discipline he uses on the city on himself as well. He wakes up at 3.30 am and religiously reads The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on the Internet.

“The rule is that you open the metro section first thing in the morning and if your name is not there, it is a good day,” he says. He answers emails, writes poetry, goes to the gym and has a breakfast meeting with someone—all before he gets to work at 9am. Gandhi’s Gujarati poems have ended up in two published books, which he seems to be more proud of than the city surplus. He gets home between 6.30pm and 8pm, and sleeps by 9.30pm.

“I don’t know who Jay Leno is,” he quips, referring to famous night-time television talk show host who usually airs around 11pm.

Gandhi’s steadfastness started young. In 1957, at the age of 17, he had come to Mumbai from Savarkundla, Gujarat, with hopes of making a fortune. He often tells Americans that he is from the same place as the Mahatma Gandhi. “We speak the same language. Same name. Except that he became the Mahatma and I became an accountant,” he says.

Adds Gandhi who fell in love with works of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: “In my younger days, I used to do some poetry, but then I discovered that if I want to eat and keep proper house, I should turn to accounting.”

When he was a student of the University of Bombay (now called Mumbai University), from which he got a law degree in 1964, he longed to study in the US partly due to his love of American literature, but had no means to pay. He spent relentless hours at the American and British libraries applying to universities until he got a scholarship to Atlanta University (now called Clark Atlanta University) in the southern state of Georgia. But he didn’t even have enough money for the flight. “Those were the golden days of American universities,” he says. The school also gave him the money to travel and he says he went there in 1965 with all but $7.

At Atlanta, he got his master’s in business administration, and later received a doctorate in accounting from the Louisiana State University. After teaching at a predominantly African-American college, North Carolina A&T, in 1966 during the civil rights movement, he spent 1973 to 1998 mostly teaching at major universities including the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Business, and the MBA programmes at American University, Georgetown University and the University of Maryland. In between, he did an internship at the government agency, General Accounting Office in 1976, and assisted the New Jersey governor on changes to the pension system in 1991. In 1997, he was brought into the DC city government to lead the collection of $4 billion in taxes, where he started his legacy.

When he walked into DC administration, it had a deficit of around $300 million and a shrinking tax base, and he found 2.6 million tax returns stuffed into a room. “In those days if you paid our taxes, we’d say thank you, if you didn’t, we’d say thank you also,” he says without a smile or pause. It is hard to tell when he is being serious and when he is joking. This time though, he pulls out pictures of a room almost filed to the ceiling with tax files. After seeing the room, Gandhi says he fired every manager. Then, he set goals for the staff of the city’s Office of Tax and Revenue. Previously, tax returns were done in about two months, but Gandhi announced publicly to The Washington Post and on television that the returns would be done in two weeks—and said he would bring cameras into the office, if needed.

Then, he took the team on a road trip to the Philadelphia Internal Revenue Service centre, the body that collects America’s national taxes. “If Maryland can do that, if Virginia can do that, why can’t we do it,” he says. “And, sure enough, they rose to the challenge and performed.”

During this time, Anthony Williams, who started the financial improvements for the city as the first CFO of DC, was watching Gandhi after having brought him in as OTR head. But, when Williams became mayor in 1999 and wanted Gandhi—who he calls Nat—to succeed him as CFO, he knew that idea would be harder to sell. Williams took Gandhi to DC’s Old Ebbitt Grill, which has served many US presidents, to make his argument. “He was sceptical about how an Asian immigrant would be received,” Williams says. “He was sceptical because, like me, he is kind of an odd ball, ya know. He was certainly sceptical of the enormous challenge. I convinced him.”

And, Gandhi took to the role quickly. His office used to be in a building in an area called Judiciary Square (his current office is on Pennsylvania Avenue, an address he shares with the White House), and he would look out from the 11th floor to views of museums and monuments. “But nothing I could tax,” he says.

But the view gave him ideas to broaden the weak tax base in the city. Although the World Bank was a tax-exempt institution, its cafeteria vendors shouldn’t be exempt, Gandhi thought. So, he took legal action and won. He would love to go after the world-renowned education and research institution, the Smithsonian, which has a profitable gift store, magazine, and travel agency that are all exempt by association.

But his lawyers tell him he would never win.

Former mayor Williams notes that Gandhi is both an accountant and a writer. “He has both sides (of his brain) working,” says Williams. And, for a big guy like Nat, that is a lot of brain power.”

Meanwhile, Gandhi says there is still a long way to go for the city. “If there is a flood in the basement and the roof needs to be fixed, we have no money for that,” he says. “Our schools, for example, on average are about 65 years old. We have the resources of a city, but we have to provide the needs of a state. Because we are a state, city, council, municipality, a school district all combined.”

His next initiative for DC is to go to the next level of fiscal discipline. He says “it is not enough to spend money, but to say what do you get out of the money.”

He wants to measure productivity and benchmark against other projects in other cities. “If you are paving one mile of streets how much does it cost here, how much does it cost elsewhere?” he asks. “So far, all we say is we spend money.” The city has spent $30 million on expanding its health-care alliance and Gandhi says he will measure the output. Gandhi is quite modest about the attention—and fame—he gets in the city. “I take one day at a time,” he says. “In this town you are a hero today and gone tomorrow.”

Odhavji Raghavji Patel | He remains a teacher despite a clockwork run on success

Sunil Raghu — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:52:00 GMT

Ahmedabad: In so many ways, time has been kind to Odhavji Raghavji Patel.

The chairman of the world’s biggest wall clock manufacturer is 82 years old and still wakes before sunrise and works until late at night. His clocks, under the brand names of Ajanta, Orpat and Oreva, are sold in 45 countries. He employs 7,000 people, 5,000 of them women, in diverse businesses from clock-making to harvesting water for farmers. His Ajanta Group even makes power-saving compact fluorescent lamps and clay-thrown vitrified tiles.

The simple life: Patel gets angry at any attempt to change his wardrobe and shows off his pension of Rs1,200, saying he is just a retired teacher and can’t afford new clothes every time

So influential has he become that Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi finds himself appealing to Patel to help move along developmentprojects.

Dubbed the “father of wall clocks” and, more endearingly, “Odhavjibhai”, Patel radiates simplicity as he sits in the courtyard of his palatial family home in Morbi. Despite the Rs500 crore empire he has built, Patel remains true to his roots—a teacher, a title he far prefers to entrepreneur.

After graduating from Shamaldas College in Bhavnagar at the age of 19, he taught science at VC High School in Morbi, a town in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, with a population of 200,000 and known as the ceramic and clock manufacturing capital of India.

And he really wanted to be a pilot. “But I came from a decently conservative family that had a traditional mindset about travel,” he says. “We believed that even if you earn less, one should not leave the motherland.”

In the early 1960s, he joined the National Cadet Corps as a junior commissioned officer. The student-run programme, which provides basic armed forces training for back-up officers in the event of attack, allowed Patel to travel across the country and helped teach him discipline. This, coupled with activities such as drama and sport at the school level, groomed him for management.

It all began in 1971 with the setting up of a small partnership firm —“minimal funds, maximum partners”, Patel says—known as the Ajanta Transistor Clock Manufacturing Co.

“I had four sons and two daughters to educate. As a teacher, my resources were limited and so I decided to do something,” Patel remembers. He had tried his hand at business before; one venture supplied diesel engines to farmers on loan, repaid once the harvest had been reaped. It was not very profitable.

Still, when representatives of the biggest clock manufacturing company then—Scientific—approached him for business, Patel did not give it a second thought. “They all were from humble backgrounds and I was the most educated among all. So they thought that I would be able to help them communicate with the outside world and set up the business,” he says.

They began the business with Rs1 lakh in a rented premises, manufacturing magnetic clocks at Morbi with coil.

But taking the products to market was not easy. The wall clocks from Scientific’s stable ruled the market and nobody either in Gujarat or Mumbai area allowed the newcomers to gain a toehold. So he thought out of the box.

“We went to South India, to Tamil Nadu and Kerala,” he says. “We went directly to shopowners to sell our clocks. This helped us improve margins for the shop owners and did away with the middle men.”

The group also moved the clocks by road instead of rail, so they were not beholden to the unpredictable schedule of the railways.

In 1974, different models and makes of clocks were introduced globally. Some used a steel strip, an import from Japan in those days. Patel felt the ingredient would change the way clock business would develop in the future and so he travelled to Japan and Taiwan with his elder son, Pravinbhai Patel, to bring the quartz technology to India. Thus Ajanta Quartz was born—the brand that made Patel’s company what it is.

These clocks were simple and provided accuracy that was earlier available only on large, expensive pendulum clocks. They did not require any maintainance and were much smaller in size.

“We travelled abroad and this helped us understand which way the world is moving,” he says. “This kept us ahead of our competitors in Morbi. Using this new technology, we could manufacture a clock at, say, something like Rs45 per wall clock, but sold the same piece at Rs105 per piece. So, profit margins were high, but the only difference is that we pumped all the money earned back into business.”

The quartz clocks were an instant success among buyers and encouraged the group to significantly increase the product range: pendulum clocks, rotating pendulum clocks, wooden clocks, ceramic clocks, glass clocks, metal clocks, and on and on.

In 1990 and 1991, the clock manufacturing activity was further expanded by shifting the factory outside Morbi.

Today, the group’s profile includes educational toys and home appliance products such as electric irons, toasters, hand blenders, emergency lamps and more.

The strategy has been to leverage strong distribution channels and introduce more and more products, which can be manufactured using facilities available with the company. This maximizes the group business and also popularizes its brands.

Beyond looking outward for opportunity, Patel is firm in his business’ commitment to social responsibility and the community around him. Of the total 7,000-plus people employed at Ajanta, more than 5,000 are women. Patel is matter-of-fact when asked why.

“Women are more sincere and less prone to wasting time at work, thus proving to be far more productive than men,” he says. Employing women was a big business potential with social implications. He therefore decided to employ them.

His son Jaysukh Patel says his father’s employment of women is linked to the water harvesting revolution, in which the family also was involved.

With the Saurashtra region shaped like an inverted saucer and a series of droughts in the late 1970s and 1980s, the elder Patel pioneered the movement to build dams and recharge groundwater.

“This brought about a revolution in the villages of Halvad, Wankaner, Dhrol, Jodiya and Morbi and helped stop migration of the workers from the Saurashtra region,” Jaysukh says.

With the rise in the water table, the men in the Saurashtra region returned to agriculture, and others who had migrated to south Gujarat began making a mark for themselves in the diamond-polishing business—leaving the women alone. Patel stepped in to help these women also support their families.

“If you wanted to employ them, you have to provide employment near their home. I travelled to every village nearby and convinced village leaders to send their daughters and sisters to work,“ Patel said.

However, it was not that easy and it was only when Patel decided to set an example from within the family that women gradually came to believe—and to work. The wife of Patel’s elder son, Pravinbhai, was roped in to come and work at the factory. Then, the female domestic help were persuaded. Gradually, women from 450-500 surrounding villages such as Paddhari, Tankara, Maliya, Dhrol and Morbi began working at Ajanta factory. Today, Ajanta has buses to transport these employees.

“They learn discipline, hard work, value of time and money at our factory. They work without any fuss. All these learni-ngs help them in running their family and dealing with their family members and people around. This has helped make society better,” Patel says.

In the clock manufacturing sector, he gave big established firms a run for their money. His strategy has been keeping profit margins low and aiming for higher volumes. He also does not believe in deploying high-end or costly technology for the sake of doing so. This has helped him cut corners and earn more.

“I did nothing new, but followed basic traits of business of selling a product that is good-looking and performs well and has a good service back-up network and at an affordable cost. Where do you need an MBA for this?” he says candidly.

His family says he remains humble: “If someone tries to change his wardrobe with new clothes, telling him that he is the father of an empire that has a turnover in crores, he gets angry and shows off his pension of Rs1,200. He says that he is just a retired teacher and cannot afford new clothes every time,” says Jaysukh, a director in the Ajanta group.

It is not without reason that even the chief minister of the state appeals to Odhavji to help him.

“I want to see Morbi clean and I want the 20,000 to 30,000 youth in Saurashtra educated in English. I appeal to Odhavji to please help me with this,” Gujarat chief minister Modi said at a meeting in Morbi to inaugurate a natural gas transportation facility.

Patel also helps run hostels for more than 50,000 girls and boys in the region, providing food, boarding and study material. He recently helped collect more than Rs78 crore from the people of Saurashtra to meet the financial needs of these hostels.

“I would continue to remain a teacher till the last breath of my life. As for the business, it is now for my sons to take it forward,” he says. “But I must tell them one thing if they want their business to prosper: Give your customers value for their money, be it in terms of pricing or quality, and don’t get into a quagmire of magnificent returns.”

The duo that wove mythical magic with bestseller Ramayan 3392 AD

Rana Rosen and Saumya Roy — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:42:00 GMT

Mumbai: It’s Sachin Tendulkar like he has never been seen before. He wears metallic armour covering rippling muscles, yellow visors, a glowing sun on his chest, and sports a bat that radiates energy.

The transformation of India’s best-known and most-loved cricketer into a superhero is under way at the Bangalore studio of Virgin Comics Llc., a company founded by Sharad Devarajan, a former employee of MTV Networks and DC Comics and Gotham Chopra, writer, journalist, son of wellness guru Deepak Chopra, and a man named for a career in comics if there ever was one.

Market creators: Chief creative officer of Virgin Comics Gotham Chopra (left) and chief executive officer Sharad Devarajan are seen by people associated with Virgin and the comics book industry as market creators. So much so that people hope that the duo will change the kind of Indian comics that hit the stands.

Gotham city is where Batman operates, and the name came to creator Bob Kane when he saw New York one cloudy evening and thought that the city looked Gothic. Chopra was initially named Gautam (after the Buddha), but changed it to Gotham.

Devarajan and Chopra, both Indian Americans, created Virgin Comics from Gotham Entertainment Group that has published DC comics such as Spider-Man and X-Men in South Asia for the past 10 years. In 2006, the two decided to create “Indian” comics with local characters and local visuals: busy streets filled with auto rickshaws; cows and traffic; women in saris.

“Asian content was becoming very mainstream in the West,” says Devarajan, chief executive officer of Virgin Comics, referring to the genesis of the company.

“You had China, Japan and Korea all becoming very prolific in exporting their content. And where was India?” asks Chopra, the chief creative officer.

Virgin hasn’t got down to the auto rickshaws yet. Its first comics have been based on the Ramayana (with a science fiction twist), and superheroes and heroines such as Devi, Sadhu, and Snakewoman. The company has also managed to rope in celebrities such as director John Woo and actor Nicholas Cage (and his son) to create characters. And it has signed on authors such as Mike Carey and Garth Ennis to actually script the books.

That’s the comics equivalent of working with directors such as Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, and Virgin has managed to do all this in a little over a year.

In this period, Virgin has also formed partnerships with half-a-dozen top names in the global entertainment business for movies and games based on the company’s characters. It has received (and continues to receive) a lot of calls from Indian writers and artists looking to be part of the Virgin story. And it has sold at least 200,000 copies of its most popular comics.

India has had its brush with comics in the past, but despite the popularity of the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) books of India Book House (a series that looks at everything from mythology to history to contemporary personalities), the medium has never really taken off in the country, the way it has in Japan, for instance.

ACK books are popular with the Indian diaspora, but Virgin’s model is different—the company wants to make its comics, with Indian characters and others, successful in the US, the biggest market for English language comics in the world.

Chopra and Devarajan are both “comics” people. The former likes to dress in baggy jeans and loose buttoned-down shirts, and sports a leather arm band and sneakers. In college, he wrote Child of the Dawn, a parable based on his father’s bestselling Seven Rules of Spiritual Success. He also edited Bulletproof Monk, a comic that went on to be made into a movie starring Chow Yun Fat.

Devarajan prefers dark suits and wears his hair slicked back and he loved comics even as a boy.

“Sharad gets this glow in his eyes whenever he talks about comics,” says writer Saurav Mohapatra, who is continuing the Devi series from the 11th book.

When the duo came up with their idea of “Indian” comics for the global market, it was immediately backed by Deepak Chopra and friend, director Shekhar Kapur (Devi is his creation), but they still couldn’t find anyone willing to invest in the project.

Devarajan says the duo approached several investors, only to hear comments such as: “We have never seen anything successful, from India (in comic books).”

Finally, Virgin Group’s Sir Richard Branson saw potential behind their idea and told them they were pioneers.

“‘And you know what happens to pioneers? They get shot in the back and someone else comes in and settles the land’,” Deverajan recalls Branson telling them. Branson eventually invested in the project, and the venture had his brand name.

Virgin launched its first set of comics books in the US—Shekhar Kapur’s Devi and Snakewoman, and Gotham Chopra’s Sadhu—in July 2006. Since then, it has also launched Ramayana, set in AD 3392, Deepak Chopra’s Indian Authentic, director Guy Ritchie’s Gamekeeper, and Nicholas and Weston Cage’s Voodoo Child.

The US launch came at a time when the US was witnessing a revival in comic books with revenues at a 10-year high. Since their US debut, Virgin comics have been launched in the UK and India. Later this year, they will go to France and Japan, both countries with a strong comic book market. According to George Salmons, an assistant manager at That’s Entertainment, a comic book store in southern Massachusetts and a self-confessed comic book aficionado, the Virgin comics have done well in the US. “It is not a top seller but (is) very strong (in terms of sales),” he says. “Comics are a tough market in America and (the genre) is dominated by superheroes and traditional stuff,” he adds.

Most new publishers die out in six months, but Salmons doesn’t see this happening to Virgin. He says that the books were not relegated to the “alternative” category in his stores (but remained popular enough to be mainstream).

According to Salmons, 75% of comic book readers that compose the mainstream were the buyers for the Indian-themed books, and Ramayan 3392 AD was the bestseller.

Overall, the comics have been received well by critics and comic book readers, although some critics say the big name creators are a gratuitous ploy for publicity. Still, writers such as Carey and Ennis come with their own following. According to pop culture information tracker ICv2, more than one of Virgin’s comics have been in the Top 300 list since launch.

And Virgin Comics’ revenues from these top sellers has been more than $600 million (Rs2,460 crore) for the 12 months of data available on ICv2 (it arrives at this number based on sales of these comics by Diamond US, a company that has had an exclusive distribution agreement with Virgin since January). More than half of those revenues came from the Devi, Snakewoman and Ramayan 3392 AD series.

Devarajan would not disclose the closely-held company’s global revenues.

Virgin Comics has also been quick to realize the multimedia benefits of being in the comics business. Sadhu is being made into a motion picture starring Nicholas Cage. Virgin has alliances with India’s Jump Games Pvt. Ltd to create mobile games; Studio 18 to make horror movies; MySpace for a comic book platform that allows readers to create comics in partnership with some of the world’s best-known comics writers such as Carey; UTV Motion Pictures Plc. to create superhero franchises; and Sony Online Entertainment to produce games for the personal computer.

Devarajan and Chopra are seen by people associated with Virgin and the comics books industry as “market creators”. “The reason I am very hopeful (about their venture) is the combination of people at Virgin. As people I think they are quite different,” says writer Samit Basu, who wrote several of the Devi books.

The Basus and the Mohapatras of the world are unlikely to have had an opportunity to write comics for DC or Marvel, says Mohapatra. “It (Virgin) is a great boost for creators in India who want to work in the graphic fiction field,” he adds.

Salil Bhargava, chief executive officer of Jump Games, says that as a gaming company, Jump longed to bring Indian themes to mobile games. “When we came across what Virgin was doing, we realized it was a perfect fit,” he adds.

Indians aren’t used to comics such as the ones Virgin puts out, admits Basu. And Mohapatra says that there is a certain expectation of the kind of fiction that can be created by writers of Indian origin. The two, and many others, are hoping Chopra and Devarajan will change that.

rana.r@livemint.com

With DND, he paved the way for smooth public-pvt partnerships

Rahul Chandran — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:46:00 GMT

In 1997, Pradeep Puri entered the Uttar Pradesh law secretary’s office and asked for the impossible: He wanted the right to sue the government.

The chief executive of the Noida Toll Bridge Co. Ltd had been tasked with building the DND (Delhi-Noida-Delhi) Flyway, an eight-lane highway that would link Delhi and Noida and decrease travel time between the metropolis and its growing suburb.

Back then, though, the project was little more than dozens of pages in a memorandum of understanding approved five years earlier. To get it going, Puri quit his job in the Indian Administrative Service to join the other side of one of the nation’s first major public-private partnership in roads.

His first hurdle was to convince the government to waive its right to “sovereign immunity,” which protected states from prosecution if they reneged on contracts. The little-known clause ensured the public and private sectors operated largely independent of each other.

“Do you realize what you are asking me—and us—to do?” the law secretary said, according to Puri.

All Puri realized was that the waiver was necessary for his project’s completion. And his successful meeting in Lucknow set a precedent and paved the way for builders to embark on joint ventures with the Indian government—a model that has been duplicated by various other consortiums to build, operate and maintain stretches of India’s 66,000km national highway network.

“I wouldn’t call the Noida Toll Bridge Co. a blueprint,” a modest Puri says. “Yes, we did face a few problems… a few roadblocks.”

Even after his landmark meeting in UP, it took 18 months for the government to sign a concession agreement which would allow the actual roadwork to begin. The irrigation department filed cases against the Noida toll company over land acquisition problems. “It was a fairly painful period,” says Puri about his first years at the helm. “A lot of us had invested time and money into this project but a lot of people did not want it to go through.”

While the upper levels of government seemed receptive to new ways, Puri said officials at the middle and lower levels opposed the private sector entering what had been hitherto their fiefdom.

Yet the project inched along.

“The thing that you notice about Pradeep is the way he does not miss the forest for the trees,” said close friend Pradeep Sachdeva of Pradeep Sachdeva Design Associates, an urban planning firm. “He always keeps the big picture in mind.”

Pradeep Puri hails from a family of civil servants—and became the first in the family to venture into the private sector. His father retired in 1980 as first secretary at the Indian Embassy in Berlin. His brother is Indian ambassador to Brazil. His sister-in-law is an Indian Foreign Service officer on assignment with the UN.

“In 1997, it wasn’t very fashionable to quit government service,” said Puri, 50, father of two children. “A lot of people thought I was mad for doing what I did.”

He requested a leave of absence but was told he would only be granted one if he continued earning a government salary, rather than being paid by his new employer. He refused.

As director of foreign investment in the department of economic affairs, Puri says his complete compensation package was Rs15,000. As CEO of the toll-bridge company, his take-home salary grew to Rs20,000 a month—yet devoid of the job security and perks he once enjoyed. (He would not comment on his current salary or his stake in the publicly traded company.)

Construction work started in 1998, and the flyway was commissioned in February 2001. Under the public-private partnership model, the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (Noida), a division of the UP government, holds 6% stake in the company. At the end of the 30-year concession period, the company turns over control of the road and revenues generated from it to the authority.

Initially, after the flyway was commissioned, traffic forecasts were dismally low and the interest on its debt added up. This led to a restructuring of debt and an issue of shares worth Rs207 crore ($45 million) on the London Stock Exchange to pay off debt. Part of the proceeds will also pay for the planned link to Mayur Vihar in South Delhi.

Last year, the Noida Toll Bridge Co. Ltd declared a net profit of Rs684.70 crore for the nine months ended 31 December 2006.

Every day, 70,000 vehicles cross the DND toll plaza, entering a Noida now defined by gated commuter colonies of sprawling flats, swimming pools and tennis courts, and multinationals from Adobe Systems Inc. to small business process outsourcing (BPO) companies.

By 2021, according to an independent traffic forecast by Halcrow Consulting India Ltd, more than two lakh vehicles are expected to cross into Noida daily.

Now sitting in a spartan ground-floor office with peeling paint and Venetian blinds, Pradeep Puri can see the road that will make their journeys possible. He looks out onto the 28-lane toll plaza with bright yellow barriers opening to let cars and two-wheelers pass.

“I think we have crossed the worst,” Puri reflects. “The financials we will keep assessing, and the traffic is going to come anyway. Nobody can stop the process of economic development.”

(Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com.)

Shobha Tummala | Setting the bar for beauty higher

Melissa A. Bell — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:08:00 GMT

Fifteen years ago, in the US, few people outside the close-knit non-resident Indian communities knew what henna was, or where one would put a bindi, or if Bollywood was an actual place. But a bubbly girl, growing up in Michigan, knew the answers to those questions, and knew that her non-Indian friends would want to know as well. But she had to find the right way to introduce them to her rich cultural heritage.
Shobha Tummala, raised in Hyderabad for the first six years of her life, always wanted to share the cultural secrets she learned from her grandmother. After she moved to Michigan, going back to Hyderabad on summer visits, she would plot ways to bring home bangles to sell at her high school. She knew Indian culture would capture the imagination of young American girls, but did not know how to capitalize on it.
Some 10 years later, she found a way with a simple thread.
Most beauty salons in the US rely on wax to remove hair; Tummala had been taught by her grandmother the natural, and less painful, ways of sugaring and threading. Tummala found plenty of threading salons in big cities in the US, which catered to the needs of thousands of transplanted Indians. However, when she tried introducing her American friends to the techniques, the small, crowded and often dirty salons would never make much of a good impression.
Tummala decided to bridge the two worlds she lived in by creating a high-end salon built on Western business practices, but providing Eastern-style treatments.
Starting with one in trendy SoHo, Tummala now has her salons in Madison Avenue and Columbus Circle
She opened her first salon, Shobha Salons, in trendy SoHo, and found herself riding the wave of Indian interest. Madonna started wearing a bindi. Saris appeared at the Oscars. And young, wealthy New Yorkers wanted threading. “It was really pre-India being cool in the US,” Tummala says. “If I hadn’t launched the salons, I would have seen so much Indian stuff out there and I would have been thinking, ‘God! I could have been doing that.’ Instead, I was one of the pioneers.”
Within five years, the business has expanded rapidly, with new salons opening in Madison Avenue as well as Columbus Circle. But before the success, few of Tummala’s friends and relatives could understand why the business—and technology—graduate wanted to enter the beauty business.
“My dad thought I was absolutely nuts,” she says.
To all outward appearances, Tummala was destined for a lucrative career in business. A degree in electrical engineering from Michigan State University and then an MBA from Harvard University. She had worked as a consultant at Bain & Co., Procter & Gamble Co., and Dash.com, an Internet start-up company.
In between career changes, she met partners at a large investment bank to discuss a job there. Before the meeting, a headhunter suggested Tummala should not wear perfume. “I don’t really care about perfume,” she says, “but I sat there thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ The job was not about being real at all.” She left the meeting certain that it was time to pursue her own path, with an idea that had been cooking for several years: Indian beauty salons.
However, Tummala was wary of investors. She had been part of Dash.com. When the Internet bubble burst in 1999, her company had $50 million investment capital that could see them through the crash. The investors were, however, no longer confident about the market and asked for all the money back. Tummala knew then that she never wanted to be dependent on outside sources for funding again.
She also knew that investors were not looking to spend money, particularly in a service company.
So, she began her business tentatively with her own money. She rented salon space from her hairdresser, Sam Wong, and hired a few threading experts, who she hired after playing the guinea pig herself. She wanted to start out small to see what type of interest it would generate and if Westerners would react positively to Eastern treatments.
“I believed 100% it could work in the market,” Tummala says, but she had to educate the public about the concept first. “Few people knew what threading was.”
Rather than rely on advertising, Tummala hit the streets, meeting magazine editors to get coverage. She says that in the beauty industry, customers are reluctant to believe advertising; they want to hear from a trusted source that the process works and is worth the money.
At first, Tummala would literally approach people on the streets, offering threading for free, hoping to get customers. But she quickly hit the editorial jackpot when Vogue, the US’ top fashion magazine, decided to write about her venture. After the article came out, people began pouring into Sam Wong’s studio, eager to try out her hair removal technique.
Within eight months, Tummala felt she had created enough interest to open her own space in SoHo. Thecompany has since been funding itself, earning enough to start two more salon spaces and invest in product lines, like its new freshening clothes that help soothe skin afterhair removal.
Today, Allure, Playboy and Cosmopolitan have written about Shobha Salons and citymagazines and websites consistently rate the salons at the top of the class. In a city of 20,826 salons—one for every 200 women—that’s no mean feat. On the top of the list of compliments: “sanitary” and “efficient”, exactly what Tummala never found at other threading salons.
Tummala said she has found a niche without much direct competition. Most New York threading salons usually charge around $7 (about Rs285) for an eyebrow shaping, compared with her $20 price tag. However, she caters to clients who are willing to pay the higher cost for more time with the technician and more hygienic practices.
“They have to see 10 clients an hour for that (business) model to work,” Tummala said. “We get four people an hour. Just from the time difference alone, you can see the quality difference. Are they washing their hands in the sink in between each customer?Do they have time to consult with clients?”
Shobha Salons do offer waxing, competing with salons such as Bliss or J Sisters—other similarly-priced New York salon chains. However, those salons generally do not have an emphasis on threading and sugaring, Shobha’s expertise.
Her customers range from young, fashion-conscious women to older ones experiencing menopause who are exploring hair removal for the first time in their lives—and even men.
Sophia Park, 28, a New York-based attorney, says, “I’m obsessive compulsive about cleanliness and it’s one of the few places I can go that I don’t freak out about it being gross.”
Tummala says the biggest challenge is keeping her customers satisfied. “It’s a service business, so you have to start over new every day. One day, I think our service is amazing and then the next day, I think we could do it so much better.”
She says she has a general idea of where she sees the salon heading, that a key goal will be sustaining a profitable business which can also help support charities, especially those in India. These days, the salons support a group of five Indian women in West Bengal, through the Sarada Kalyan Bhandar organization, pay for their college education, health care and living expenses. The salons also sponsor a charity, School-on-Wheels—that educates street children in Mumbai and Pune and, on board a bus, offers classes in reading, writing and hygiene, as well as food and water during the day.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by e-mail to interview@livemint.com

Anirvan Banerji | Riding the waves of a successful business cycle

Melissa A. Bell — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:27:00 GMT

It was the moment of truth for Kolkata-born economist Anirvan Banerji. In 2000, his boss, the founder of one of America’s leading economic research institutes, had died, and left him in charge.
It was March 2001, and everyone, including the then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, was predicting fair weather ahead for the US economy. The Internet bubble had burst, but the economy had barely twitched. The stock market looked unshakeable.
Hardly anyone took Ecri’s forecast of a recession seriously, till it was proved right after 9/11
There was just one problem. Banerji’s team at the Economic Cycle Research Institute (Ecri) did not agree with the venerable Greenspan. Their economic models pointed in one direction, and one direction only—towards recession.
“The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished,” Banerji says, talking about Ecri’s forecasting models. “We were in a moment of truth: either we call a recession or we don’t.”
Exactly one year to the day, Banerji realized that “recession was unavoidable”. Geoffrey Moore, the founder of Ecri, had passed away. The man whom The Wall Street Journal called “the leading pioneer in indices” had been Banerji’s professor and mentor for 15 years. His passing left an enormous hole at Ecri.
Now the former student, along with co-director Lakshman Achuthan, had to prove the company had the ability and confidence to plug that hole. They knew that if they incorrectly called a recession, the world would think that without Moore, the group couldn’t survive.
“I was really wishing I could talk to Geoff at that time,” Banerji said.
Banerji says if you believe in your work, you should stick to it.
Still, for the 51-year-old, there was only one way forward. “If you believe in your work, stick to it.” Banerji did just that. He stuck out his neck and predicted a recession was looming. Hardly anyone took him or his team seriously. In economic circles, they were called “party-poopers”. The Dow Jones rallied 20 points over the following week.
But other economists gradually joined the “party poopers”. Finally, when passenger airliners flew into the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, the recession that Ecri had predicted struck home.
And when their fellow economists sifted through the evidence, one clear consensus emerged. Ecri had been right. Recession would have hit with or without the events of 9/11. And suddenly, Banerji’s team were the toast of the economic town.
Ecri’s job is to monitor the business cycle, to watch the world’s economies to predict when markets are growing and when they are about to tip into recession.
Giant corporations and governments—from DuPont to Disney and from Toyota to Taiwan—flock to Ecri’s doors, for advice on when and where to invest, and when to pull back.
But Banerji’s work is not all about dry economic numbers. Sometimes it surprises even him, like when a multinational pet food company contacted him and started talking about what the company referred to as “doggy down time”.
Banerji was puzzled. Would recessions really hurt pet food sales? Don’t all dogs have to eat? But the team did some research. As it turns out, when a dog dies, the owner typically waits to get a new dog. That “down time” depends on how well financially the owner feels he or she is doing.
“If you aggregate millions of pet owners, when the economy is doing bad, fewer dogs are being fed,” Banerji recounts. “We couldn’t even imagine that a recession would affect them, but it does.”
These days, Ecri is also reaching out to ordinary investors and small businesses, a venture that began with its 2004 book, Beating the Business Cycle: How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy.
The book’s success prompted the group to expand its website to offer daily economic updates for subscribers, who pay $20 (Rs814) a month. Whether you are trying to decide which job offer to chose, or if graduate school might be a better bet, or if you want to know when to buy or sell a home, Ecri’s website promises invaluable advice.
“What we can do is to monitor the business cycle and give you the ability to ride the cycle, making it much smoother and more viable,” he promises.
Banerji came to the US to attend Columbia University where he received a graduate degree in business in 1985, after getting a master’s degree in business administration from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad in 1979 and an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur in 1977. He had finished his schooling from St Xavier’s School in Kolkata.
He never intended to stay in the US—until he came under Moore’s influence. But, to this day, he still retains his Indian citizenship.
“It’s mostly sentimental, but you never know,” he says. He does return to the country of his birth regularly, as Ecri expands to cover Asia’s third largest economy. In 2000, he launched an economic index for India with Pami Dua, an economics professor at the Delhi School of Economics.
Together, they author monthly newsletters that track the rises and falls of India’s economy. Dua says it is Banerji’s intuition and skills she so greatly admires.
“We’ve been writing together for seven years, once a month, so that really says it all. He has a deep insight into using the system of indices.”
Banerji wanted to help Indian business move away from using “the weather and war mentality” to predict business cycles. But to do that, India needed a recorded history to gauge its business cycle.
“India needs to establish a track record over the years before people can understand that [the business cycle] can be useful to them,” Banerji insists. “You can’t predict the economy until you start collecting data.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that this measured man is not getting too carried away with the meteoric rise in India’s economy. Caution, he says, remains the watchword for an economy that used to be based on the monsoon rains, but now is swept by a whole new array of forces.
“Now that it has become a world economy, more factors play into the rise and fall. People must move cautiously,” he says.
Whether in India delving behind the numbers or in Connecticut reporting to delegates from the Chinese government, Banerji is pleased with his personal business cycle. For the moment, he’s happy to be riding on the wave of success.
“We are in this very privileged position of doing interesting research, while earning a decent living and at the same time helping people,” he says.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by e-mail to interview@livemint.com

Minal Joshi | She helps mothers-to-be find the perfect fit of comfort and style

Sudha Menon — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:36:00 GMT

Beach babes in Jamaica, Spain or other parts of Europe flaunting their perfectly toned and tanned legs will likely not know this, but their hand-embroidered Brazilian bikinis have been designed and manufactured by an electronics and telecommunications engineer based in Pune in western India.
However, Minal Joshi, 30, is not thinking bikinis right now. Late last year, she launched Uzazi Fashion Pvt. Ltd, a range of fashion apparel for pregnant women. She says she cannot understand why hundreds of thousands of expecting mothers in urban India are reconciled to wearing ungainly clothes that do little for their expanding girth, and even less for their morale. Uzazi has launched a range of garments for pregnant women—work clothes, party wear, even gym clothes.
“It is fashionable to show off your pregnancy bump,” says the mother of two whose bright idea for maternity wear came from the fact that she had to go through her first pregnancy in unflattering nightgown-style garments—the only kind of clothes available in the country for pregnant women. “I hated going to work in sacks, so I decided to fashion clothes for myself that made me feel good about my generous figure, and also lent me support where I need it,” says Joshi.
The clothes caught the attention of friends and neighbours in the middle-class Maharashtrian locality where the family lived. Before she knew it, she was gifting her maternity clothes to friends for their baby showers.
A brainstorming session with husband Xitij, also an engineer, and countless visits to shops and malls all over the country soon convinced her that maternity wear could become a profitable business for one simple reason: There were no national brands.
Uzazi, which translates into bright and evident joy, is perhaps the only indigenous brand of maternity wear currently available.
The label works around the theory that pregnancy is something to be flaunted, not hidden under voluminous salwar kameezes.
And so, Joshi, with help from a few designers, launched clothes for pregnant women that mirror what they would otherwise wear: trousers, skirts, jeans, capris, gym clothes, even party wear, including a midnight-blue party gown with a plunging neckline that is a particular favourite with customers.
Uzazi has a flagship store in Pune’s upmarket M.G. Road, and stores in Mumbai and Pune. It is also available in other multi-brand stores and chains, it is in the final stages of tying up with two chains, but everything will be settled around the Diwali festive season). “Women are coming into the store and asking us to make styles which they have fantasized about, or seen on thinner women,” says Joshi.
She isn’t the only one eyeing the market. Last year, Shopper’s Stop Ltd entered into an alliance with Mothercare to launch a range of apparel and merchandise for mothers and children. And at least two popular designers showcased an entire range of maternity wear on the catwalk at fashion shows in New Delhi in 2006.
Maternity fashion is a multi-billion-dollar business in the West where designers, retailers and discount chains cater to the tastes of pregnant women who want to follow pregnancy fashion trends set by celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears and Catherine Zeta Jones.
Over the next few months, Joshi plans to roll out 10 stores across major metros—a combination of exclusive brand stores, shop-in-shops at malls and multi-brand shops. Four stores are already up in Pune and Mumbai, and the rest will open in Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad by Diwali.
“Real estate has suddenly become a constraint to growth and we were keen to put up our own stores,” says Joshi.
Meanwhile, the couple are on the verge of tying up with at least two chains in the Gulf to supply them maternity wear, and expect the plans to go on-steam two months from now. The company is already in talks with a US-based veneture capital firm. “We hope to take turnover to Rs2.5 crore in the first year itself,” says Joshi.
“We started with 60 styles and now have over a 100 and, each week, we have a fresh idea, with a number of them actually based on customer feedback,” adds Joshi, who operates out of a tiny facility in the bylanes of Shukrawar Peth, a thickly-populated part of old Pune. “My engineering background makes it easy for me to visualize and construct garments that are just right for the peculiar body shape of pregnant women,” she says.
A teenaged Minal met future husband Xitij while in engineering college. She says he helped her become confident enough to be an entrepreneur. Her foray into entrepreneurship came during her stint at the local gym as instructor when she discovered there were no locally-made leotards to be had. So, she started getting them manufactured at a T-shirt manufacturing unit and selling them to her students.
Two years down the line when the manufacturing unit could no longer meet her demands, she decided to enter the business on her own.
“My father said that he would help me out if needed, but made it clear that I had to find my own banker, chartered accountant and make my own business plan,” says Joshi.
With a Rs5 lakh loan from a bank, Joshi jumped into the business, initially manufacturing leotards for a local sports goods retailer who sold it under its own brand.
On a visit to Mumbai’s famed Fashion Street, she chanced upon the Tonga leotard, with its characteristic high-cut legs, worn by women in the Western world. She bought the only two pieces of the garment left in the store and carefully went over the details of fabric, tailoring and design details. “At Rs30 a piece, it was great learning,” says Joshi.
She used the resources at her brother-in-law’s disposal, a garment production veteran in Mumbai, to get a list of suppliers who could sell her the right material for this.
A.V. Clothing Co., her company that started manufacturing leotards, soon diversified into swimwear and launched its brand Fiesta Clara, in 1998. Dunlop placed an order with the company for sports wear. And the company also started making speed and ice-skating costumes, and yoga, wrestling and gymnastic suits.
“Spending Rs2000 for an imported swimming costume for every day practice is not possible for most families, and Fiesta Clara was perfect since it cost only Rs400 and was designed with the Indian figure in mind,” says Mridula Gramopadhyay, a former national-level swimmer and waterpolo player.
Joshi has a tie-up up withlocal swimming pools where coaches now recommend itto students.
The company’s export business took off after it was spotted by Turkish retail brand Collezione on the net. Last year it supplied 2000 hand-embroidered Brazilian bikinis to their stores.
International purchase houses are regular visitors at the company’s tiny office, and bikini orders this year are poised to cross 6000 every month. Italian brand Mona Lisa is currently in talks with the company, but with limited manufacturing capacities Minal knows it is only a matter of time before she runs out ofcapacity. A.V.Clothing is building a new facility that will double capacity.
“When India’s Komal Nahar wore my costume at the World Championships for rhythmic gymnastics at Baku in 2005 and the Asian event at China earlier, my heart filled with pride. My kids love pointing out my figure and ice-skating costumes to their grandparents and friends when they are worn by the team at national and international events, and that compensates for every hardship,” says Joshi.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Champika Sayal: A life dedicated to golf and a pioneer with an eye for talent

By Anik Basu — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:27:00 GMT

Try talking to Champika Sayal about her personal life, and all you get is golf, more golf and, at last, a short recollection of her childhood—although, even then, she was playing golf.
Now 44, with three grown-up children, the sport Sayal picked up as a 12-year-old using hand-me-down clubs and stray balls is what keeps her going.
In her own words, “I’ve dedicated my life to golf.”
It’s fitting and understandable, then, that women’s golf in India revolves around Sayal. Secretary general of the Women’s Golf Association of India for professional players, she is the force behind spreading the sport among Indianwomen—and bringing world attention to it, those who know her say.
Her biggest achievement as an administrator so far has been to organize the first-ever women’s Indian Open, just held in March at the DLF Golf & Country Club in Gurgaon. Professional players from 17 nations competed for an impressive $100,000 (Rs42 lakh); next year’s prize money will be doubled.
The India Open is not just about an international pro tournament coming to the country. It’s about the world recognizing that Indian women’s golf has matured from sari-clad, parasol-clutching socialites putting on the greens to young, confident women playing against the best for money.
It’s also a metaphor for the progress of business women, gaining green ground in an elite sport known for helping seal deals.
“It’s not a little thing… bringing top international players to India, bringing sponsors to the women’s circuit,” said octogenarian golfer Sita Rawlley, winner of Indian sports’ top honour, the Arjuna Award, in 1978. “Champika will go down in history for what she has done.”
For years, as secretary of the women’s cell of the Indian Golf Union, Sayal helped spread amateur golf for women. She still does that, but in 2006, she also helped found the Women Golf’s Association to take talented players to the next level in the professional circuit.
Others have to do her bragging for her.
“Obstacles, stumbling blocks were put up by others, but she saw through them,” said Madhu Brar, mother of Irina Brar, who is now India’s top pro woman golfer. Irina was discovered by Sayal when she was a precocious 10-year-old. “Champi is a visionary.”
In Chandigarh, Sayal spotted Irina Brar, who at the age of four earned a medal in a figure-skating tournament. When told the child played tennis but no golf, Sayal asked, “Why not?” recalls the player’s mother.
Sayal worked on the younger Brar after that, arguing there was a shelf life to a tennis player’s career, while a golfer could play competitively till old age. “Champi was very encouraging, took Irina to (female player) Nonika Qureshi, and motivated her to take up golf,” the star golfer’s mother said.
Parneeta Garewal was 12 years old and riding a scooter when Sayal first saw her. “I was so impressed with the child that I thought she had to be introduced to golf,” she explained.
Similarly, she took Vaishavi Sinha, a member of the Indian women’s golf team at the Doha Asiad, under her wing when the player was only nine years old.
Sayal openly admits poaching on other sports for players; two girls have been lured away from basketball and are being trained to play golf competitively. “I’m hoping the 2016 Olympics will include golf as a discipline, we’ll have a women’s team ready by then,” she says. There are only a handful of pros now, but Sayal has set herself a target of 100 women in the pro tournaments by 2009.
She’s inspired by the “Korean model”, she says: the Koreans stopped participating in international meets 10 years ago, and concentrated on building a talent pool.
“They are leaders today,” Sayal says.
Daughter of a military man, Sayal was exposed to golf early on the army’s courses, watching others play. When she took to swinging the club, it was with clubs rejected by her elders. She ferreted out lost balls from behind thickets on the fringes of the course.
“Golf balls in those days had to be imported and duties made them terribly expensive. We weren’t exactly underprivileged but golf equipment wasn’t available in the canteen,” she said. “Today’s children are so much better equipped, and their parents are so much more aware.”
On a recent summer morning, Sayal met with a woman at the Indian Golf Union office at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi. The woman was the mother of a teenage golfer—“a talented youngster”, Sayal later said—and felt she’d been given a short shrift at a local tournament.
Sayal responded that every course followed rules outside the official guidelines. Sayal promised to look into that particular club’s fairway laws.
After the woman left, Sayal explained: “Study of golfing rules is education in itself.”
Sayal sees a strong connect between education and golf. There are lots of math calculations; a lot of rules to learn and a good education can help a player use these rules to one’s advantage, she says.
“That’s why we need lots of educated ladies taking up golf in India.”
It’s this faith in education— and the fact that golf infrastructure wasn’t as developed 15 years ago—that made Sayal encourage her three children to focus on academics over golf. All her children now work or study abroad.
“As a parent, I had to make a choice; golf is a game one can start at any age,” Sayal said.
Today, with infrastructure more advanced, Sayal is more confident about working with children. At the Delhi Golf Club, four senior coaches are training 200 children—with equal batches of girls and boys; underprivileged children qualify for free lessons. The best 50 or 60 will be coached in a special “camp of excellence” to take them forward.
When Sayal represented India for the first time in 1981 as an 18-year-old at the Queen Siriket Cup in Japan, other teams were “shocked” by the Indian equipment—used golf balls and torn golf bags.
This sorry state continued till as recently as 2003; players had to fix export certificates issued by the customs department officials on their equipment before leaving for an overseas tournament.
In 2000, when Sayal left with 27 children with 27 golf sets for Malaysia, the same process was followed. “Those were harrowing moments with the customs people in Delhi, it was an ordeal,” she said.
Long-time golfer Rawlley recalls warning Sayal years ago that the road ahead would be filled with obstacles, and being told, “I’m well prepared”.
Ask Sayal about it, and she credits a stint in Kolkata in the 1980s: “There was no water, no power, no kerosene, and young children to take care of. She also recalls her encounter with stark poverty at Mother Teresa’s Prem Daan centre, where she volunteered. She says: “The experience changed me”.
Now she is using it to good effect to change the face of women’s golfing in India.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com

Sebastian Joseph: This farmer changed the face of cardamom cultivation in India

Ajayan — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 17:20:00 GMT

On a recent May morning, Sebastian Joseph is hard at work on his 1.5-acre (around 65,000 sq. ft) plot of land in the Kattapana hills of Idukki, Kerala. It’s a small field and Joseph, who has been a farmer all his life, manages and works on it himself. This morning, he is dressed in a lungi, a coloured and patterned piece of cloth worn like a sarong that is popular across south India, and a shirt. His face is weather-worn and creased and he looks like any of India’s multitude of small landholders who eke a meagre livelihood out of agriculture (which he is), not like the man who changed the face of cardamom farming in India—which, too, he is.
In the 1990s, Joseph developed the Njallani, a variety of cardamom that now accounts for 70% of all of the spice, some 11,250 tonnes in 2006, grown in India.
Cardamom grows wild in the rain-fed forests of the Western Ghats, largely in Kerala and a bit of Karnataka. Much of the world’s supply came from these natural growing plantations of the spice, until the British chose to established organized plantations of the crop in the 1800s in Kerala and other parts of the country where they already had coffee plantations. Until Joseph came up with the Njallani, though, conventional yield per hectare (around 2.5 acres) of the crop was 200-250kg. Njallani increased that to 1,500kg.
J. Thomas, director of the Indian Cardamom Research Institute (Icri) at Myladumpara in Kerala, describes Joseph’s contribution to cardamom cultivation in India as “simply great” and says that it is partly because of him that the country now has a “major place in global cardamom cultivation” after Guatemala.
In 2006, the global market in the spice was around 40,000 tonnes, of which the Central American country accounted for 68% and India 30%. Thomas adds that the Njallani variety accounts for 90% of the crop grown in Idukki.
Pollinating an idea
Joseph was born in Pala in the Kottayam district of Kerala to parents who were agricultural labourers. He grew up poor, dropped out of school after Class IV and took to odd-jobs on other people’s fields. He migrated to Kattapana in 1953 after his marriage. He bought some land, built a small house, in which he still lives, and tried his hand at growing rice, banana and tapioca, but nothing worked till he picked cardamom.
The spice didn’t make him rich, but it helped him raise his four sons —three of them have moved out, but the youngest, Roy, still lives with his parents.
Joseph discovered Njallani by accident. He has an apiary on his farm; bee-keeping, he thought, would bring in additional income. The bees helped cross-pollinate different varieties of cardamom on his farm and Joseph’s idea was born watching them do that. He isolated varieties that had emerged from cross-pollination (through the simple expedient of throwing a net over them to prevent the bees from sullying the strain) and marked each of them. He then counted the output of these plants, in terms of number of cardamom berries, or capsules. He picked the high-yielding varieties among these, and cross-pollinated them. A decade later, he developed a variety that produces 120-150 berries (per plant) compared with the 30-40 of normal varieties. He named this Njallani, his family name. Icri confirms the variety yields more than traditional varieties.
Joseph also came up with a radical way of growing cardamom. For years, farmers had planted seedlings and waited at least three years for their first crop. He planted shoots cut from the high-yielding variety he had discovered and found that the first crop could be harvested after two years.
Poor personal yields
News of Joseph’s discovery spread. “Farmers began stealing my plants after they heard that their yield was high,” says Joseph. “The only way out was to sell them for a small price.”
Cardamom is an expensive spice. Indian cardamom trades around $7-8 (Rs287-328) per kg in the international market and Rs350 per kg in the domestic one.
However, Guatemalan cardamom trades only around $4 per kg. Njallani, by increasing yields from 250kg a hectare to 1,500kg, increases yields per hectare for farmers between Rs87,500 and Rs5.25 lakh.
B. Sreekumar, economist and deputy director of the Spices Board, says the lives of the growers in the region changed after the coming of Njallani. With higher yields, their income rose, improving their standard of living. And with more pluckers required per acre than before, the farmers started hiring more people.
The demand for pluckers even led to an increase in their wages, benefiting the overall economy of the region. But Joseph, the man behind Njallani, hasn’t benefited much from his discovery. “I never knew how to make money,” he says.
As Joseph gave the plants away, Njallani became the dominant variety grown in Idukki. Its fame spread to Karnataka and farmers from there visited Joseph’s farm. He visited some of their estates and advised them on the right way to grow Njallani. They paid him Rs2,500-10,000 he says, more as a token of respect than anything else.
Joseph has mixed feelings about the fact that plantation owners who grew Njallani make millions while he continues to eke out a modest livelihood, but he claims he is satisfied that he could change the fortune of the country’s cardamom growers. Joseph did not patent Njallani because he says he doesn’t know anything about patenting.
“I am 78 (years old),” he says. “I have studied only till Class IV. I did not know the true value of my work and still remain a marginal farmer.” He doesn’t mind patenting the new variety he is developing but does not know how to go about it. “I have heard about patents, but neither can I afford them, nor do I have the knowledge or expertise required. I am developing a new variety using the same old methods. But I cannot reveal details. All this patenting can happen only if someone comes forward to help me,” he adds.
In 2001, a farmer from Vandanmedu won the Spices Board award for harvesting 2,750kg of cardamom from a hectare of the Njallani variety of cardamom plants.
A new challenge
Abraham Koshi, a farmer in Idukki, says Njallani comes with its own share of problems. “The yield is best in conditions where there is assured irrigation and good land management practices,” he adds. “We need to develop more varieties (of cardamom) and not just depend on one variety,” he says.
Times have also changed in Idukki. Icri’s Thomas says that the massive use of chemicals and deforestation are coming back to haunt most cardamom farmers.
The three acres Joseph started with have now come down to 1.5 after he gave some land away to his sons. He continues to grow cardamom but is acutely conscious of the challenge that looms ahead of the industry. “I am a cardamom man and shall continue with this throughout my life, but there are serious problems (facing growers) now,” he says, referring to the effect chemical fertilizers and pesticides have had on the soil of the region.
Joseph uses only biofertilizers and natural pesticides in his plot, but admits that because of this, the yield is low. He is working on a high-yielding ‘organic’ variety, but says that despite 80% of the work done, he isn’t sure if he will “complete it.” “Age is not on my side,” he adds.
Sixty in Sixty is a special series that we plan to run through 2007, the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. We will introduce you to sixty Indians—both here and abroad—who are not rich or famous. These are people who are making quiet, but important, contributions without seeking headlines, to help make India and, in some cases, the world a better place. We also welcome your suggestions on people whom you think should be profiled in this series. Please send your suggestions by email to interview@livemint.com