The New Boom

Better Off Than Dad

Services Sector: Growth Engine

Faces: Adventure Capitalists

Adapters: Tradition Meets Technology

Industry: Being Indian

Careers: Techies Line Up For Jobs Online

The Scindias: Will Power
The contentious will of Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia virtually disinherits her only son Madhavrao Scindia. This controversy threatens to mar the reputation and respectability of one of India's best- known and highly regarded royal families.

Gujarat: Shaky Regime
Confronted with a monumental disaster, the Gujarat Government is at the centre of relief operations. Was its reaction timely and efficient? Could more lives have been saved?

And Greed Hits Home
More than anything, it was corruption that killed people in Gujarat as buildings constructed by getting around norms came crashing down.

Public Sector: Shotgun Exit
First large PSU where workers agreed to leave the company.

THE NEW ECONOMY: ADVENTURE CAPITALISTS

A New Spin

Ganesh Devaraj
MD, Soliton Automation

"IT-enabled businesses can be a reality in Coimbatore due to the huge software talent."

He was expected to take over the reins of his family's Narayankrishna Spinners in Coimbatore. Instead the 32-year-old textile scion got himself a doctorate in engineering from the US. Ganesh Devaraj returned in 1998 to start Soliton Automation, a company into virtual instrumentation-a concept new to India. The application uses computers on the shopfloor to ensure zero defect. The Soliton client list includes Daimler-Chrysler. Since inception its revenues have grown 185 per cent. Says Devaraj: "it-enabled businesses can be a reality in Coimbatore because of the huge software talent in its colleges." Devaraj recently launched Soliton Labs, bringing the city's software talent together to build "Net-enabled virtual instruments", and is opening a centre to "develop automation software for the semiconductor industry". Devaraj has given enterprise a new face in Tamil Nadu's cotton capital.

-Methil Renuka

Drug Lord

Varaprasad Reddy
CEO, Shantha Biotechnics

"Positive thinking gets you there.

Frankly, K.I. Varaprasad Reddy should have been sulking. In 1985, Reddy quit a secure job at a PSU in Andhra Pradesh to start his own business. Five years later his partner ran off with the money. The setback only steeled the 54-year-old
engineer's resolve to stick it out. In another five years a new venture, Shantha Biotechnics (SB), produced India's first genetically engineered product-a vaccine to combat hepatitis B. What made his success sweeter is that it's available at an affordable price. Reddy's achievement has also turned the old relationship between a big pharma company and a biotech firm on its head-the vaccine is marketed by Pfizer.

Reddy now wants to go global. In August 2000, his newly formed Shantha West acquired a US biotech firm. He now plans to hit Nasdaq after a $100 million ADR. "My role is that of a facilitator in a team committed to providing cheap therapeutics to the poor," he says. Cheap drugs in this day and age? No problem. "Positive thinking gets you there."

-Amarnath K. Menon

Kick Starter

B.T. Bangera
MD, Hi-Tech Arai

"We offer the best for people at the lowest levels."

It may be a sleepy pilgrim town but Madurai has not been without its entrepreneurs. R Lakshminarayanan of Hi-Tech Arai-a joint venture with Japanese companies Arai Seisakusho and Mitsubishi-is one of them. But ask him, and the founder-chairman attributes his company's success to his managing director and "right-hand man" B.T. Bangera.

The company today incorporates a Japanese work culture and "competes with the world's best out of Madurai". Starting off as a small-scale unit in 1987, Hi-Tech Arai clocked a turnover of over Rs 58 crore in 2000. The company has three product groups: oil seals, reed-valve assemblies (for two-stroke two-wheelers) and technically specified molded rubber parts, primarily high-precision, fuel-efficient and pollution-control equipment that few manufacture in the country. "Which is why today we are competing with the world's best,'' says Bangera.

Bangera, a 1970 IIM-A graduate, formerly with ABB, calls it contemporary management technology, offering the best "for people at the lowest levels". Adds Lakshminarayanan: "Countries like India and China will be the most important economies for mobility, people, goods and ancillary technology."

-Methil Renuka

MetroScape
Random Readings
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra would rather be "accurate" in his latest undertaking, a book of Kabir's poetry in English, even if he says "Kabir's greatest hits may not have been written by him at all".
more...

Looking Glass

Kolkata: Restaurant

Bangalore:
Art Exhibition

New Delhi: Play

Who says Indian theatre is dying? Playwrights--both veteran and budding--in the country had a chance to interact with those from the Royal Court Theatre, London, at its first residency workshop in Bangalore recently.
It was a fortnight
of enrichment, concludes Principal Correspondent Stephen David in Despatches.

"I was very much against the idea of India," says William Dalrymple, author, The City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi. In conversation with INDIA TODAY's Sonia Faleiro, he talks about his old girlfriend, Delhi and his "enormously exciting" next book, The White Moghuls in Interviews.