(Captain GR Gopinath founded Air Deccan and is considered a pioneer in the low-cost airline sector. He quit Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party on May 24, five months after joining it)
The late CK Prahlad, while delivering a lecture a few days before he died, said entrepreneurs are the new freedom fighters and can lift India out of the shackles of poverty.
Entrepreneurship is the art of stretching limited resources with daring unlimited dreams. But India is a riddle. There are seemingly four Indias today - the India of vast teeming restless multitudes mired in poverty and living in sub-human conditions; the India of scams, scamsters, politicians, fixers, middlemen and oligarchs; the rising middle class and the new entrepreneurial India with a common heartbeat.
But first a few words on the other three Indias. The sheer magnitude of poverty and unemployment of a majority of our population is overwhelming. They are seething with anger and resentment at their exclusion and are ready to take to arms and violence seeking equity and justice because of a pervading sense of helplessness and despair.
The new educated middle class, who were till recently indifferent and cynical to the larger general problems that afflict the country, are now in the forefront of the movement against corruption. They are also dreaming of an India whose golden age is not behind, but ahead of us.
It is the entrepreneurial economy which built America and many countries in Europe and destroyed feudalism. The reforms that were set in motion by Narasimha Rao spawned a new, resurgent and aspirational India. It dismantled the old aristocracy and built on its ruins a new economy.
Entrepreneurs challenge the status quo. They create wealth where none existed before - a new market, a new customer satisfaction, something new, something different, they change and transmute the nature of resource for better value.
A simple idea for example and an audacious dream - "Every Indian must and can fly" - made me set up Air Deccan. The first clear-cut thought of starting an airline for the common man came to me thousands of miles away from home on the low-cost South West Airlines flight in the US when I was seated next to a beefy man, chewing on a burger. He turned out to be a carpenter. And that was my moment of epiphany! I had no money but was consumed and possessed by the dream of making the common man fly in India and Air Deccan took to the skies within a year. The eco-system made it possible.
Though the great companies born out of reforms and the poster boys of enterprise have come to represent modern India, real wealth and transformation has taken place in less glamorous industries. It was and is a myth that most jobs get created in the hi-tech industries and corporate sector. As management Guru Peter Drucker noted in the American context in the 1980s at the height of America's economic power, the growth and large-scale employment came from very small and mid-size companies not Ford and General Motors.
For us in India, the challenge now is how to create jobs in the "other India". If the "new India" with speed and greed and manipulation of the system creates a dual economy - a wealthy economy with islands of prosperity co-existing with vast areas of poverty and illiteracy and malnutrition, then, it does not lend itself into a stable and socially cohesive society.
Self-trust is the first secret of success and hope is the mother of all reforms. Narendra Modi has already infused that optimism and sense of pride into the people of the country, especially the young with aspirations and dreams.
The biggest impediment to our entrepreneurs today and by extension to growth of the economy are our policies, our bureaucracy and antiquated rules and regulations which strangled innovation and growth and encourage corruption and indecision. To cite an example, the official corporation licence fee to start a very small Udupi Hotel in Bangalore is just three thousand Rupees. But the incidental expenses, the euphemism for "speed money", to get your small outfit off the ground is anywhere from 30000 to 40000 rupees. Let us not even speak of the kind of astronomical sums needed to get clearances in aviation or allocations in coal or out-of-turn allocation of various resources at the corporate level, as it is an open secret.
It is relatively easier to clear large-scale industrial projects and Modi has an enviable track record in his state. But the challenge for him will be how he translates that promise of good governance, more governance and less government across the country at lower levels of enterprise so that millions of entrepreneurs with hardly any money but full of dreams, ideas and energy can easily start their ventures and sustain them without being preyed on by vultures.
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