True Grit: The phenomenal growth of the Indian entrepreneurial spirit

Ushering in social entrepreneurship was the milk co-operative trio Tribhuvandas Kishibai Patel, Dr Verghese Kurien and HM Dalaya. Amul was born in response to the exploitation of marginal milk producers by traders and agents. Dalaya’s innovation of making skim milk powder with the world’s first buffalo milk spray-dryer was a technological breakthrough that revolutionised India’s organised dairy industry.

From the late 1950s, the government pursued a strategy directed at conserving foreign exchange, producing heavy capital and intermediate goods domestically, building science and technology infrastructure, and maintaining ownership of industries in areas such as electricity, petroleum products, steel, coal, and engineering goods. The large, integrated steel plants established after 1950 were government-owned, with the exception of Tata Steel.

In 1948, JRD Tata launched Air India International, the country’s first international airline. Under his guidance, the Sir Dorabji Dadabhoy Trust established Asia’s first cancer hospital and the Tata Memorial Center for Cancer, Research and Treatment. It founded the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the National Centre for Performing Arts. In 1956, he initiated a programme to give workers a stronger voice in the affairs of the company. He espoused an eight-hour working day, free medical aid, workers’ provident scheme and accident compensations, later adopted as statutory requirements in India.

In 1956, Brijmohan Lal Munjal and his siblings got a licence from the Punjab government and a bank loan of about ₹50,000 to set up a factory named Hero Cycles. In 1975, this company became India’s largest manufacturer of bicycles, making 7,500 cycles a day. By 1986, it was producing over 18,500 cycles a day, becoming`g the world’s largest cycle manufacturer.

Dhirubhai Ambani is the lighthouse example of an entrepreneur, who created an equity cult in Indian stock markets. A dispatch clerk at A Besse & Company, he was sent to manage an oil filling station at Aden, in Yemen, where he roamed the souks to watch merchants trading goods worth millions in global currency. In 1958, he returned to India and set up a textile trading company. The brand’s ‘Only Vimal’ tag line turned chiffon and polyester sarees into style statements.

Jaswantiben Popat and six others—Jayaben Vithalani, Parvatiben Thodani, Ujamben Kundalia, Banuben Tanna, Chotadben Gawade and Laguben Gokani—thought up this enterprise on the terrace of their building in Girgaum, Mumbai, in 1959. Their first production, a kilo of papad earned 8 annas. Shri Mahila Griha Udhyog Lijjat Papad became a revolution that changed the face of cottage industry in India. The company’s current annual turnover is over ₹800 crore.

Har Prasad Nanda and his brother Yudi arrived in Delhi from Lahore after Partition. To impress and revive his business contacts, Har Prasad hired a suite of rooms at The Imperial, Delhi’s most expensive hotel. It worked. The Escorts Group played a pivotal role in India’s agricultural growth, especially in farm mechanisation. In 1961, it started manufacturing its own tractors, and more than 1 million tractors have rolled out from its facilities since then.

Agricultural scientist Dr MS Swaminathan is renowned for his leading role in introducing and developing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice in India. India’s Green Revolution started in 1966, leading to an increase in food grain production, especially in Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.

Azim Premji was studying electrical engineering in Stanford University, USA, in 1966 when he was called upon to handle the family business, due to the sudden demise of his father. He was just 21. Under Premji’s leadership, Wipro metamorphosed from a ₹70-million company making hydrogenated cooking fats into a pioneer of integrated business technologies and process solutions.

Karsanbhai Patel graduated with chemistry and worked as a lab technician at Gujarat’s geology and mining department. In 1969, he started an after-office business of detergent powder, made and packed in his backyard. Patel would sell these packets door to door for ₹3 per kg, a third of the price of leading detergents. It was an instant success. Patel’s Nirma brand of detergent, named after his daughter, created a new market segment and within a decade was India’s largest selling detergent.

In the 1970s, TCS began exporting its services and pioneered the global delivery model for IT services, with its first offshore client in 1974. Its first international order came from Burroughs, one of the first business computer manufacturers. Faqir Chand Kohli started as an engineer with Tata Power Company, and rose through the ranks to become the deputy general manager. In 1969, he was given the reigns of TCS, and over the next two decades he shaped its destiny.

After graduating in zoology from Bangalore University in 1973, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw went to Ballarat University in Melbourne, Australia, and qualified as a master brewer. Mazumdar-Shaw started as a trainee brewer in Carlton & United Beverages, and joined Biocon Biochemicals in Ireland as trainee manager in 1978. In the same year, she founded Biocon India in collaboration with Biocon Biochemicals, with a capital of ₹10,000. Banks were hesitant to give her loans as biotechnology was a a new field and she was a woman. Mazumdar-Shaw brought in biotech research and clinical trials from overseas firms and made Biocon into India’s biggest biotechnology company.

The Infosys legend began in 1981 when NR Narayana Murthy dreamt of forming his own company, along with six friends. Getting wife Sudha Murty’s savings of ₹10,000 as seed money was Murthy’s first big break. The second break came in 1991, when Indian doors to liberalisation were flung open. Infosys became the first Indian company to be listed on the US NASDAQ. While working in France in the 1970s, Murthy was strongly influenced by socialism. It was his belief in the distribution of wealth that made Infosys one of the first Indian companies to offer employees stock-option plans, turning some into dollar millionaires.

Dr. Anji Reddy is a pioneer in pharmaceutical research in India, founding Dr Reddy’s Laboratories in 1984. The company transformed the Indian bulk drug industry, from being import-dependent in the mid-1980s to self-reliant in the mid-1990s, and finally into the export-oriented industry that it is today. Starting a full-fledged R&D laboratory in 1992, DRL invested about ₹1.12 billion in R&D over eight years, providing research facilities in areas like inflammation, metabolic disorders and infective diseases.

Originally from Tamil Nadu, Shiv Nadar moved to Delhi in 1968, working as an engineer with DCM Ltd. Along with six of his colleagues, Nadar launched a firm making office products like copiers. In the late 1970s, when IBM quit India, Nadar’s HCL Technologies stepped in to fill the vacuum. In 1982, HCL came out with its first computer. Today it is a multinational IT services and consulting company. As of July 2020, the company, along with its subsidiaries, had a consolidated annual revenue of $10 billion.

Sunil Mittal had begun in 1984, assembling push-button phones in India, replacing the old-fashioned, bulky rotary phones. He identified an opportunity in mobile telecom in 1994, successfully bid for a telecom licence, and launched services under the Airtel brand name. Bharti Airtel’s early foreign partnerships helped it grow with much-needed capital, resources, and strategic advice. These helped it combat the inherent advantages of state-owned and business group-affiliated rivals, and grow into one of India’s largest telecom service providers. The business model was innovative, and IT management services and hardware (telecom towers) were outsourced to vendors. Fixed costs were converted to variable costs. As a result, India now has one of the lowest-priced telecom services in the world.

GR Gopinath was the man who made flying affordable to millions of Indians. When he launched Air Deccan in 2005,  a no-frills airline modelled on European budget carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair, he changed the aviation industry and reformed it into a common man’s mode of transport. When Gopinath found 500 idle airports and airstrips in India to help expand regional connectivity, his friends from the army were his greatest supporters in fulfilling his dream. He was spirited, but often bit off more than he could chew, and failed in his ventures, like any true entrepreneur.

Looking at job ads in newspapers in the 1990s, Sanjeev Bikhchandani knew that there were far more jobs out there, and wondered if there was a way to aggregate it. In late 1996, at the IT Asia fair at Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, he saw a stall with a “www” sign and got his first exposure to the internet. He worked out a listing of 1,000 jobs from newspaper ads, and developed the Naukri website in a week. In April 1997, Bikhchandani launched Naukri.com as an Indian job portal. A year later, the dot-com frenzy hit India with skyrocketing valuations. Bikhchandani had known about building a business the traditional way, so when the dot-com bubble burst in March 2001, he put away the money he had raised, safely in a fixed deposit.

Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal were stuck at the same lab in IIT Delhi, trying to complete their delayed projects when they met. In September 2007, bored with their jobs at Amazon, they pooled in ₹4 lakh and started Flipkart, selling books that were easy to list, ship and find vendors for. In the early days, the Bansals rode around Bengaluru on bikes every alternate day, delivering orders. They also sourced the books, for which they sometimes scoured through warehouses for hours. By 2012, Flipkart had become a unicorn, and by 2013-14, it set new benchmarks for online retail in India by building an unrivalled logistics and supply chain operation. In 2018, US retailer Walmart acquired Flipkart for $16 billion, and led to the exit of the founders.

IIT-ians Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal were in their mid-20s when they launched Meesho, a reseller platform in 2015. They had learnt from their previous failed startup that several small businesses were selling their wares online, but weren’t using their own websites to do so; nor were they listed on Amazon or Flipkart. Instead, they were leveraging the power of social media. Aatrey also stumbled on an interesting discovery: A lot of women were using the Meesho app to run shops on WhatsApp. Since its launch, Meesho now ranks as India’s most popular online marketplace for resellers. One of Meesho’s biggest achievements: Empowering women to run their own home-based businesses and create a new professional identity for themselves.

The brainchild of Dhaval Shah and Dharmil Sheth from Mumbai, PharmEasy has emerged as a leader in the online pharmacy space since its launch in 2015 for a reason: India’s drug distribution system is disorganised, lacking established retail chains, and forcing pharmacies to depend on middlemen. PharmEasy supplies medicines to customers at a flat 20 percent discount. In 2019, PharmEasy merged with its investor entity, Ascent Health, to form API Holdings. This June, PharmEasy’s takeover of Thyrocare helped it double its valuation to ₹30,000 crore, and strengthen its position in the diagnostics industry.