India Inc.

India Inc.

The promenade of sanguineness

Talk about our nation and we find a can of worms; worms of corruption, illiteracy, unemployment, higher prices, weak infrastructure and a bunch of social problems- worries, botheration and glitches everywhere! Moreover, external threats merely ex-tend the list of challenges confronting India (Let‘s not get started on terrorism!). En-ter the various arenas of agriculture, business, technology – the box of worriment keeps expanding in volume, thus making the future, ultra-mosaic! Amidst such sinis-ter clouds, India has a zealous set of young work force and a resourceful population too! With an astute cluster of B-schools like the IIMs, XLRI and MDI, and their B-dexters, our business is surely going to boom! Commingle this ingenious and avid youth class and you find a spark, the one which aims at reinventing models for India, radically! These very ‗business creators‘ not only ascend the country‘s opulence but also place India competitively in the global marketplace. Thanks to such Einsteins, the business design principles in India have undergone a reform- a shape for the good of the common man, and they have been ameliorating day by day. Today, inde-pendent of the special market conditions, India exhibits the Westerners a pivotal source of inspiration; the design principles which everyone should consider…. (At least, once!)

The 10% Rule:

India has been good at revamping constraints into creativity and adroitness. The 10% rule states that the goods and services are delivered to the market at a price which is 10% of the western world‘s average price. This could raise competitiveness to altogether a new level. Take an instance of Seva Foundation‟s Clinton Global Initiative Commitment whose sole vision is to eliminate blindness in spite of the bar-riers of indigence, remoteness and ignorance. The motive is simple: one million more eyes will see again every year by 2015. In the past year alone, it has performed over 500,000 eye surgeries and screened over three million people for eye health. So, it is necessary to lower the costs instead of assuming big budgets so that every common man has access to such awe-inspiring goods and services.

Mass Mobilization:

This principle draws out a model to ‗employ‘ the unemployed rather than ‗pay‘ the unemployed. India has cogently tapped human networks to deliver both, marketing and social services. (A bizarre, yet a blooming combination!) Rings a bell? 9

The Mumbai Dabbawallas! Having delivered over 200,000 lunches to people in offices and schools from their home every day for decades, they have set up a gilt-edged paradigm to this principle. This delivery system is zappy yet simple-

You employ a swarm of scantily literate delivery men to manage deliveries in a cost efficient manner! So, while we can recurrently talk about the perils of nesting a huge population, mass mobilization can be the tour de force behind serving a large consumer base.

Technology as infrastructure:

An effective use of technology instead of physical infrastructure can improve the delivery of social and commercial services efficiently and effectively. ITC‘s ‗E-choupal‟ system depicts how efficiently technology can be used to establish a spread-out infrastructure. The E-choupal is designed to tackle the problems faced by Indian agriculture characterized by weak infrastructure and involvement of nu-merous intermediaries. ‗E-choupal‘ services today reach out to over 4 million farm-ers in over 40,000 villages across ten states in India. It solves the problems of infra-structural inadequacies by deploying several innovative solutions like power back-up through solar batteries, upgrading BSNL exchanges with RNS kits, 24 x 7 help-desk, etc. Through internet kiosks, it provides the farmers with information on weather, and access to wider markets. This not only generates economic value but also transmits a flow of links from the business to the social world!

Broader Platforms for collaboration :

It is necessary to pursue more cross institutional collaborations and joint ventures; collaboration is an efficient means of enhancing the delivery of development pro-grammes. The Andhra Pradesh Government has introduced an online citizen ser-vice portal, APOnline Limited, a tie-up with the Tata Consultancy Services Limited. It provides services in the areas of agriculture, health, education, business and gov-ernment services which have helped the government in improving transparency and reducing delivery cycles, thus reducing the cost of compliance with governmental regulations. Such examples shake the roots of the naïve belief that cross institu-tional collaboration is an unwanted means of extending the reach and capacities of any given institution.

Retracing the model:

Sketching new models requires the status information about the current model, the cream activities of the current one and the novel ideas that would match up the old ones. Besides, rethinking on ideas that would bring values and redesigning errors (may be, faults!) in the earlier model, form an unavoidable part. And this is not like making a duck soup!! 10

With a lagging education system on one hand and a whopping emerging man-power on the other, India has completely rethought the ways in which it can re-cruit and train its workforce. These will handout India to capitalize on its re-source and become a major global R&D hub. (By 2020, India will have the larg-est labour surplus in the world—45 million people.)

Imagine an ad interim educational system that considers workers with wobbly educational backgrounds and turn them into R&D specialists- sounds filmy? Well, it isn‘t! The Indian industry has worked out a codified industry-based skill development program draping rigorous training programs. With this resourceful new model, offshore R&D has become a booming business in India, and is ex-pected to grow over 20% a year, to a $21 billion industry in India by 2012. So, now, it need not count on a multitude of PhDs to make way through an educa-tional system to serve the commercial agenda!

The above designs canvas new models of enterprising brushed from the princi-ples of a blossoming business! Such examples are worth challenging the status quo and asking ‗What if?‘ One never knows- more radical possibilities indeed stimulate a nimble reality; these models might give rise to a few aristocratic Mom and Pop and spawn a country full of Biz pundits!!!

Abhishek Manian, TE EXTC

Roma Kalani, TE CMPN