Thursday, March 30, 2006

entrepreneurial India

Entrepreneurship in India



Indian Stock Markets are rising. IT and ITES (BPOs d’oh) are bringing money into India. Foreign Institutes are investing heavily. Is it a sign that our economy is on the rise? Is it a sign that we are going to catch China one day?

Firstly, the main question to ask is, whether India is self employed or not?
We have our Nation’s youth working BPOs which provide services to citizens of foreign nationals. We change our names from sameer to Sam, worse we even change our accent, so that those dumb witted Americans can understand we are saying. Not only do we work at odd hours but also have suffered racial abuse more often than not.
People say fine, if the money is good we should be able to tolerate all such nonsense.
Moving on to the IT industry. Very few Companies actually are setting up research labs in India. Most of the companies again are just expanding into India to hire cheap labour (read: so called software professionals).
Labour sounds so demeaning doesn’t it??
Well, we are not quite the architects. We just do, what we are told!!
The design part is done by the Main Office in US; we are just required as masons who follow the plan.
Most of the people, I have met quite frankly don’t even care. They are just happy to work in those “posh” offices and carry a payload back home(which is at least twice /thrice more than what they would have earned , had they continued pursuing their actual career read: mechanical, civil etc).

Obviously, being slaves cannot be that bad can it?? It took 150 years, a half naked guy and a dozen of revolutionaries to awaken people and realize the need of freedom.
Now we have lost that “awakening”. We only see it in movies. Watching movies like “Rang de Basanti” is not an awakening!!!

Enough of lecturing one will say. What is the worse that can happen?
We already have seen it. Any guesses?
What was the main agenda when Dubya visited India? Nuclear Deal right.
We want nuclear sanctions to be removed. Who the fuck is US, to decide whether we can generate nuclear power or not? Tomorrow, if we don’t cooperate with the US on anything, instantly the US Congress may ban all BPOs. Then what will we do?
Once the BPOs go, so does the “posh” offices, so does those “swanky” cars and then we will see which direction the economy goes.


The need of the hour is to empower ourselves. We need to go from being the slaves to being the master.
We need to create an entrepreneurial India. India claim to fame is that, we produce world class software developers. We don’t need these guys to go and work in the back offices of Microsoft to prove that. What we need is to make these guys entrepreneurs.
Look at countries like China, South Korea and Taiwan. They are leaders in the semiconductor industry. In the magazine I read, it stated the “if you throw a brick and it hits somebody in S.Korea that person is bound to be manager of his own firm”. People there say, government did not support them; they were self motivated and competition among themselves made them rise.
E.g. look at Hyundai, it started only 10 years back and now has a market worldwide. Other examples are Samsung, LG etc.
Even Tatas and Ambanis don’t have a global market. The work done by Mittal and Narayan Murthi is very commendable. Where are we lacking .We are smart, hard working and have all that it takes. We need to wake up before India becomes a puppet to US. Although the government is asleep, and it may never wake. It is time to take to India’s destiny into our hands.
Look at the marvadis , they are so good at doing business, may be even better than MBA guys . They should stop their kirana stores and start thinking big . I am sure they will succeed.
IIT have already started something known as “incubators”. Here IITians are provided support (finance, technical as well as infrastructure) within the IIT campus itself . Once the company starts taking shape, they move out of IIT and pay IIT back. I loved the concept a lot.
According to a report, in the next 20 years India is the country that is going to have the maximum population within the range of 20-40 years. We should take advantage of the situation.

The future is bright for India ………entrepreneurial India