WOMAN'S TOUCH: Nooyi at the FICCI meeting

Her homecoming was a mix of personal bliss and professional frustration. Often referred to as India's prodigal daughter, Indra Nooyi, president and chief financial officer of $26-billion PepsiCo used her first official visit to India to do some plain talking: India's tax rates are punitively high and complicated, its infrastructure is archaic and the pace of the economic reforms programme is frustratingly slow.

To those even vaguely familiar with Indian business and politics, the complaints would sound old and boring. But what made them refreshing and forceful was that they came from 46-year-old Nooyi, born in India, living abroad and working for a company that does business in nearly 200 countries. Accompanied by her senior colleagues, including President, beverages, Peter M. Thompson, Nooyi flew across six Indian cities in seven days with three specific goals: to provide a first-hand experience of India to top Pepsi executives, to review Pepsi's businesses in India and to advise Indian leaders on what to do to make India grow faster-and to increase Pepsi's investment in the country. But the highlight was clearly her hard talk on the frustrations of doing business in India.

Diaspora

Nooyispeak India remains one of the world's best kept secrets. What I don't see in India are big changes in the infrastructure and the removal of lingering regulatory barriers. We are too inward-looking ... too quick to resist fresh ideas. To all the leaders of India ... I say don't let India become irrelevant. Reform in India comes too slow. While other nations gallop, India strolls.

Understandably so. Since entering India in 1989, PepsiCo has invested over $500 million with not a penny in profits so far. Its accumulated losses are estimated at Rs 253 crore (about $50 million). The soft drink market registered a negative growth last year, partially because of high taxes, which comprise up to 40 per cent of the retail price of soft drinks, compared with 10 to 15 per cent in south-east Asian countries.

Till now Pepsi's investments in India and China have been almost equal, but while the company will quadruple its investment in China in five years, in India it won't increase by more than 60 per cent. But that need not be if "India plays ball with us," says Nooyi. Making a case for removing "barriers to profitable growth" in India the PepsiCo superwoman asked for elimination of discriminatory tariffs and surcharges, removal of red tape and improvement in infrastructure. "Given my position in the company (she is number two) I can influence Pepsi's decision-making in favour of India, but I can't do that till I see prospects for profitable growth," she said.

Be it the high-power dinner she had with editors of select publications, breakfast with business editors, an emotional address at the industrial chamber FICCI, or a meeting with Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, Nooyi used every forum to underscore India's big problems and its bigger potential. Pepsi's interest was, of course, a subscript in her timely pleas for change, given that India's budget for 2002-03 will be presented on February 28 and is likely to restructure taxes.

America's 10th most powerful businesswoman who "leaves her crown in the garage" when home, is willing to help correct the negative perceptions of India in corporate America, even hinting at an informal grouping of top ranked Indian executives in the US. But not much will change till leaders of India act. And to them Nooyi's request is "don't let India become irrelevant."