The Economist, Entrepreneurship and India
Posted : March 18, 2009 at 10:49 am [IST]
Some views in the article ‘The formula for entrepreneurship of the special report on the entrepreneurship in ‘The Economist’, are revealing:
More recently India and China have become the second and third most entrepreneurial countries in the world, trailing only America, according to Monitor.
Some 85% of all the high-growth businesses created in America in the past 20 years were launched by college graduates.
University research departments have helped to drive innovation in everything from design to entertainment.
The three most entrepreneurial spaces in modern history have been the ones inhabited by the Jewish, Chinese and Indian diasporas.
And in ‘Entrepreneurs doing good’ the report gets interesting making Indian entrepreneurship all pervasive:
THE Iskcon Sri Radha Krishna-Chandra Temple feels like a bit of ancient India preserved in the heart of modern Bangalore. The air is filled with chants of “Hare Krishna” and “Hare Rama”. Monks in orange robes offer flowers and food to the gods and produce haunting sounds on conch shells.
In fact, India’s entrepreneurial revolution is as visible here as anywhere. The temple has a conference room equipped with state-of-the-art audio-visual aids. Its board of directors includes several leading software billionaires and their wives, providing it with money as well as connections. The monks are entrepreneurs as well as holy men, one moment talking about reincarnation and the next about sustainable delivery models.
The temple provides 200,000 local schoolchildren with free meals every day. It achieves this miracle of abundance by a combination of mechanisation and careful management. The temple’s 250 employees use giant machines to clean rice and prepare chapattis. They then pack the food into steel containers and load it into a fleet of custom-made vans which keep the food warm as they crawl through Bangalore’s traffic-clogged streets.
And entrepreneurship is visible all around. India’s social entrepreneurs have performed excellently. India’s Aravind Hospitals perform 250,000 eye operations a year, and do 60% of their work for nothing.
Vinod Kapur has built a successful company with the purpose of feeding India’s rural poor. He invested $1m-and many years of his life-in breeding a superchicken. The result was the Kuroiler: multicoloured, resistant to disease, capable of surviving on farmyard scraps, strong and wily enough to fight off predators, and producing twice as much meat and five times as many eggs as ordinary chickens. Mr Kapur has built an entire supply chain around the Kuroiler, including specialist farms that breed them and vendors who sell them across rural India.
Surprisingly, for many young and even retired ones entrepreneurship has become religion:
The Former MD Entrepreneur: Jagdish Khattar creator of the Maruti Suzuki success story, after retirement, decided to change the way Indians maintain their cars. Khattar’s company Carnation will be a chain of car service centres with capacity to handle 80 per cent of the models and makes on Indian roads. It will be a car servicing company in organized sector unlike the unlicensed neighbourhood mechanics. Carnation’s first outlet is in Noida and Khattar plans to have a nationwide presence by the middle of next year. Khattar plans to foray into car sales and mechanic training schools. And for entrepreneurship, no matter how good the idea, experience matters. And Khattar has plenty.
Young Product Innovators: Ajit Narayanan (27), Adib Ibrahim (28), Aswin Chandrasekaran (27) and Preetham K. Shivanna (26)-all from IIT Madras- set up Invention Labs at Chennai for developing engineering products and that too India-specific ones in June 2007 with an initial capital of Rs 15 lakh and a seed capital of Rs 5 lakh from IIT Madras. It has developed a few products: Kavi-a handheld communication device for children afflicted with cerebral palsy and machine vision systems for quality control. It is betting big on retail vending machines-prototypes of which are under development. Meanwhile, its servicing business-designing of sub-components and parts for various industries-ensures adequate cash flow for this start-up to keep its activities going.
Indian entrepreneurship stories are growing steadily. Even graduates of IIMs and IITs today prefer to get into some business over fat salaried jobs with MNCs. Many unknowns till now are getting recognition. Arbind Singh of Nidan is one such person. Nidan builds profitable businesses and ‘people’s organizations’ that are led by assetless, informal workers. Nidan has positioned unorganized workers as legitimate competitors in globalizing markets of India.
The state must encourage the entrepreneur zeal, and the parents must allow their children to try their talents on their own. Entrepreneurship only can win the battle over the poverty of India.
- Indra
Category: Employment/Education |
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