I am very much interested in Indian entrepreneurs, These are the people who had been in US and lured back to country. The growing opportunities in India and the strength of economy is surely people are looking in to. I dont know when I am going back but things are good in India. I will write about the life in US and about the dollar dreams in India.
Broking brains
Nirmal Jain,
Founder and CEO, India Infoline
Chartered accountants may not seem to possess the guile and energy to build and run a successful business, but Nirmal Jain's wild family roots reek of the non-comformist. His forefathers, commodity traders from Rajasthan, nearly bankrupted themselves when the silver market crashed in 1978. Twenty years later, Jain jumped ship from a stockmarket research firm and founded India Infoline, a fast-growing online financial supermarket.
Green giant
Chetan Mani,
Founder and CEO, REVA
Few budding Indian business leaders can boast a more meandering route to success than Chetan Maini, founder and managing director of REVA Electric Car Company. Almost 20 years after racing a solar-powered car to third place in a pan-Australian rally, the Bangalore-based entrepreneur seems somewhat surprised to be heading the world's largest maker of road-worthy electric vehicles (EVs).
Maini's career path is a classic Indian success story. He enjoyed early home-schooling and developed an interest in go-karting before being packed off to Michigan by his father to attend college. After earning a Master's from Stanford, he returned to southern India and co-founded REVA in 1994 with American partners
Wheeler-dealer
Dheeraj Garg, CEO, Steel Strips Wheels
Dheeraj Garg is in many ways the archetypal thirty-something Indian entrepreneur. He started young, setting up Steel Strips Wheels (SSW), a producer of steel hubcaps, wheels and rims, at the age of 19 in 1991, using a few million dollars raised from a domestic IPO. Success was slow in coming. Garg, now 34, was thrown into cutthroat competition with Chennai-based Wheels India, a company that had a virtual lock on the market for hubcaps in India. But the country's emergence as a favoured production base for automobile components, along with Garg's own drive and willingness to badger potential customers -- finally tipped the market in his favour.
Pantaloon prince
Kishore Biyani, founder and CEO, Pantaloon Retail
Kishore Biyani might not be India's best-known retailer, but he's certainly the biggest.
Over the past five years, Biyani has transformed India's entire retail sector with the Pantaloon Retail company, of which he owns 44%. He has brought value-for-money goods to the middle-classes via his 112 Pantaloon clothing stores, Food Bazaars and general merchandise Big Bazaar outlets, which employ 12,000 staff. I His next major launch: Brand Factory, a discount chain selling top fashion labels, being rolled out in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
Sugar daddy
Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, chief executive, Bajaj Hindusthan
Kushagra Nayan Bajaj is a man in a hurry. It has taken him under three years to turn a minor family concern, Bajaj Hindusthan, into the world's third largest sugar producer, behind Cosan of Brazil and Südzucker of Germany.
The corporate, which is listed on both the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange, will clear US$55 million in profits this year, Bajaj says, on revenues of US$870 million. He has funneled US$1 billion into the construction of several giant new production plants in the Indian sugar heartland of Uttar Pradesh that have each yielded 60% in annualized returns since issuance. He says that he got the money through a combination of internal cash and US$380 million raised from two Luxembourg GDR offerings.
Tech trailblazer
Rajiv Mody, founder and chairman, Sasken Communication Technologies
True to the best IT clichés, Rajiv Mody founded his company in a Silicon Valley garage in 1989 with US$50,000 in savings. Two years later he transported Sasken to southern India, where he set about building its reputation as the country's leading second-tier technology services firm behind Wipro, TCS and Infosys.
Speaking at his Bangalore headquarters which, with a fountain in the courtyard, oversized pillars and dimly-lit taupe corridors, resembles a Las Vegas casino in the off-season, Mody says his company has a lock on the mobile technology sector in India. "Roughly 12%-15% of our revenues go into R [meaning US$2 million in the latest quarter alone].
Money magnet
Atul Ruia, CEO, AREPL
Atul Ruia, one of India's rising real estate kings, balks at the thought of being a billionaire. "Not yet," he says with a cautious smile. Perhaps he's worth "US$400 million or US$500 million", but he says he really doesn't know.
Asiamoney 17 no9 34-6 O 2006
