Vision India 2020: MIT India

Twelve years ago, in 2008, it was clear that the labor arbitrage–based IT services industry that had made India a player in the global technology market was facing a threat. The key issue was supply-demand equilibrium. India’s engineering education system simply could not keep up with the demand for talent. >>>

Vision India 2020: Preface

This is a new series in which I invite readers to take a journey with me into the future through the minds of multiple entrepreneurs, who by addressing the opportunities I see today, will perhaps shape the future of India.

But in this series, we will close our eyes, and exist in this future, and BE each entrepreneur.

Enjoy!

Note: Vision India 2020 was subsequently published as a book. You can order it from Amazon, Kindle, Amazon.in, etc.

A call to Indian entrepreneurs everywhere, Vision India 2020 challenges and inspires readers to build the future now. In this “futuristic retrospective,” author Sramana Mitra shows how over the next decade, start-up companies in India could be turned into billion-dollar enterprises. Vision India 2020, which encompasses a wide range of sectors from technology to infrastructure, healthcare to education, environmental issues to entertainment, proves how even the most sizeable problems can be solved by exercising bold, ambitious measures. Renowned in the business world, author Sramana Mitra conceived Vision India 2020 from her years of experience as a Silicon Valley strategy consultant and entrepreneur. Well aware of the challenges facing today’s aspiring entrepreneurs, Mitra provides strategies, business models, references, and comparables as a guide to help entrepreneurs manifest their own world-changing ideas. 

As India Builds (Part 8)

In the front portico, several cousins assembled around Wall Street banker Ronti’s Blackberry and marveled. As I joined them, eyes darted to me. “You probably have one of these?” “Sure, I have a Treo,” I replied, my eyes glazing over the Blackberry, to focus on the marble staircase on which, at four, I fell and broke all my front teeth. I noticed cracks on the marble.

We gathered for music and poetry, Raja played the Piano, Aveek the Harmonium. They led the group through song after song from Tagore’s abundant repertoire – the songs of our childhood, the music of our culture. Deesha, bored, cell phone in her ear, sat at a distance, chatting with her boyfriend. Her body here, but only physically; in her mind she fled as I have all my life, been fleeing from Elgin Road. In many ways, this evening, for me, was a very personal celebration of loss. There is a primal cord that holds us all to what we knew as children. Is it this table full of delicious food that we have shared on so many occasions? Is it these antique mirrors that have reflected back at us both our growth and our limitations? Is it this staircase that we have climbed and descended, into and out of, the bosom of the house? >>>

As India Builds (Part 7)

Our family, miraculously, still holds the old property pretty much intact. The partition suit continues, providing the building itself a temporary protection. Meanwhile the real estate boom in India marches on around it, with the house sitting there, frightened, like an old bride of Bengal at the mercy of the patriarchs.

On my recent trip, I assembled as many of our kin together as possible, for a single evening. Cousins from Geneva, Mauritius, Australia. Negotiations had to be made with a few to convince them to leave aside their hostility, their grievances. One meal together, I asked. In the end, they all came; one family after another stood in the doorway, as if modern portraits of the same families that had come 30 years before. >>>

As India Builds (Part 6)

The face of Calcutta is degenerating fast. Droves of glittering shopping malls welcome young Calcuttans – since among other things India is also importing Retail Therapy. A new credit card industry booms. The expanding middle class rejoices in the sudden Western availability of product after product after product. Satya Paul saris and Giorgio Armani jackets float in shop windows, and in today’s India, people actually have the money to afford such luxury.

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As India Builds (Part 5)

Until a few decades ago, most Bengali homes housed joint families. Our homestead on Elgin Road comfortably housed some 15 family members and another 15 servants. Sunday dinners crammed twenty around a table littered with round-puffy-golden luchis, rich-red goat curry, and an opulent choice of Sandesh and Rasogolla desserts. The children eating as fast as we could so to be excused, rushing back out into the ubiquitous smell of mangoes for intricate hide-and-seek games. We searched in the third floor roof terrace, chased down the wrought iron spiral staircase that only the janitor was to use. We hid behind the shutters in the second floor verandah, shrieked on the over-bridge that connected the main house to the outhouse, and were caught finally, gasping for breath in the greenhouse.

We had no idea of the Future. >>>

As India Builds (Part 4)

Such is the destiny of developing nations. The same routine runs from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. It runs in Mexico, in China. It runs in Brazil, and in Romania.

Darjeeling, the erstwhile Queen of the Himalayas, once enchanted with pine-lined walks strung from house to house. Today, it flashes neon signs to welcome tourists.

In the heart of the Himalayas, the picturesque villages are upgraded from utmost poverty and poetry, to mediocrity. Their sun-bleached Buddhist prayer flags that flapped in the mountain wind no longer whisper their blessings. It is the era of cement, development widely believed to be a wonderful thing.

But what of beauty? Of preservation? Paris preserved. Kyoto. San Francisco. Will India fail to preserve?

As India Builds (Part 3)

The past always recedes. Sensible people do not let that be bothersome. The old steps aside for the new and so it should. Yet, looking out the car window driving through India these days, I am stricken by the pace and brutality of this transition. Chowringhee, Calcutta’s once impressive Paris-esque boulevard, is now layered in flyover roads obstructing views of British era architectural gems such as the Indian Museum, and Geological Survey. The imposing Calcutta Club building has also lost its eminence with the intervention of the Lower Circular Road flyover.

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