World's Billionaires: Celebrating not just super-riches but India's entrepreneurial spirit
A cursory glance at the Forbes list of 169 Indian billionaires suggests that it's populated by the next gen of traditional families who have seized new opportunities, along with a healthy sprinkling of first-generation tech entrepreneurs
Forbes India shines a light on billionaires not just for their super-riches but for being champions of the entrepreneurial tradition. And it’s the latter that’s been around in India from at least the 19th century.
Let’s examine this phenomenon: When writing India’s New Capitalists (first published in 2008), author Harish Damodaran ducked into Federation House, the headquarters of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in Lutyens’ Delhi, which has black-and-white portraits of the Federation’s presidents from 1927 onwards. “Four out of every five are from traditional merchant communities”—essentially communities including Gujarati and non-Gujarati Banias/Jains, and Marwaris and Parsis whose trading and banking networks have “historically extended over widely dispersed territories beyond their home base…” observes Damodaran. “The traditional business families form the crust of what is known in Marxist literature as the ‘national bourgeoise’.” Or perhaps India’s first ‘pan-Indian capitalist class’.
Damodaran notes that “what has been extraordinary about the Marwaris and other Hindi heartland Banias is their capacity for regeneration and throwing up fresh lots of businessmen generation after another”. Despite the ‘mixed economy’ model that India pursued post-Independence, which saw excessive policy control, the entrepreneurial tradition of the early capitalists persisted.
Then came 1991, freedom from the Licence Raj, liberalisation of a slew of sectors, from automobiles and aviation to telecom and banking, the maturing of the equity cult, the entry of foreign portfolio investors, paperless trading, and the emergence of venture capital and private equity. The rise of knowledge-based industries like software services and pharma innovation saw the arrival of a new breed of entrepreneurs from disparate families and communities, but the traditional industrial family and community, too, was able to benefit from economic reform.
It was a good mix. For instance, pre-1991, in the Licence Raj, almost all of India’s top business houses were from the traditional mercantile communities. Today, a cursory glance at the Forbes list of 169 Indian billionaires suggests that it’s populated by the next gen of traditional families who have seized new opportunities, along with a healthy sprinkling of first-generation tech entrepreneurs.
Last Updated :
April 24, 23 11:01:08 AM IST