K.P. Singh

K.P. Singh, the Chairman of DLF Group has given a new form to the real estate business of India. He was

born on August 15, 1931. His birthplace is Bulandshahar situated in the state of Uttar Pradesh. He graduated

with Science from Meerut College, and moved to UK to pursue a degree in Aeronautical Engineering. He

returned India to join the Indian Military Academy at Dehradun. K.P.Singh joined American Universal

Electric Company which is a joint venture between Universal Electric Company of Owosso, Michigan and

K.P.Singh's family. Later he established Willard India Limited in co-operation with a Philadelphian company

ESB inc. He joined DLF Universal Limited as the managing director in 1979. K.P. Singh's greatest

achievement is he transformed Gurgaon, a barren village into one of the favorite real estate destinations of

India. All over India, DLF has at present 100 million square feet of land which is being developed for

residential, commercial and retail projects. The company has an excellent track record of building 21 colonies

in Delhi and its neighboring areas in a span of over six decades.

K.P. Singh has been associated with a number of professional organizations. He has been the President of

ASSOCHAM (Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India). He was the President of the PHD

Chambers of Commerce & Industry. Currently, he holds the post of Director, Central Board of Reserve Bank

of India; Honorary Consul General, Principality of Monaco; Member of Executive Committee of Federation

of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI); Council Member, Eastern Regional Organisation for

Planning and Housing (EAROPH); Founder Member, National Estate Development Council (NAREDCO);

Member, Economic Policy and Reforms Council, Government of Rajasthan and Member of the Board of

Governors, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. He received the 'Delhi Ratna' Award from the Chief

minister of Delhi Ms. Sheila Dixit for his exceptional contribution to Delhi.

Dr. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw

Dr. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw has entered the elite ranks of the Indian business world as India's richest woman.

Born on 23 March, 1953, she is the Chairman & Managing Director of Biocon Ltd. She did her schooling

from Bangalore and graduated in Zoology from Bangalore University in 1973, after which she moved on to

Ballarat University in Melbourne, Australia. She became India's first woman Brew Master and started off as a

trainee brewer in Carlton & United Beverages in 1974, following which she worked in various positions in

Kolkata and Vadodara. She collaborated with Biocon Biochemicals Limited, Ireland, to found Biocon India in

1978. Initially, she faced many problems, but she was not the one to give up. Her firm has grown to be the

biggest biopharmaceutical firm in India today. Though her business interests keep her occupied, she has found

time to write a book titled 'Ale and Arty'. She tied the knot with John Shaw, in 1998, who was working as the

managing director of Madura Coats. After their marriage, John Shaw quit Madura Coat and joined Biocon.

A very active social activist, she has been involved in various projects like the Bangalore Agenda Task Force

(BATF). She was awarded the MV Memorial Award, given in honour of the great engineer and visionary Sir

M Vishwesharaiah. Apart from this, she was awarded the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award in

2006, the Padma Bhushan in 2005, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Indian Chamber of Commerce

in 2005, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in Healthcare & Life Sciences Category in 2002

besides the Padma Shri in 1989. Dr. Kiran Majumdar-Shaw has held several honorary and advisory positions.

Among them, she was the Chairperson and Mission Leader of the Confederation of Indian Industry's National

Task Force on Biotechnology, a member of the Prime Minister's Council on Trade & Industry in India,

Member, Board of Science Foundation, Ireland , Member, Board of Governors, IIM Bangalore and many

others. In doing so, she has set an example for other Indian women to follow.

Lalit Suri

Lalit Suri was a parliamentarian and the former Chairman of the Bharat chain of hotels , a leading chain of

hotels in India. Bharat chain of hotels encompasses the seven Grand hotels in Delhi, Mumbai, Goa,

Bangalore, Srinagar, Udaipur and Khajuraho. Lalit Suri was born on 15th April, 1947 in Rawalpindi. He

graduated from St Columbus and Sri Ram College of Commerce, New Delhi. Both at the school and college

level, he participated in swimming and athletics at the state level. He studied automobile engineering and

initially constructed bodies of vehicles. He shifted to the hotel business by establishing the first hotel in Delhi

in 1988. The Bharat chain of hotels expanded at a very rapid rate under the guidance of Lalit Suri. Besides the

hotel business, he was also an ardent traveler and an art lover. Lalit Suri died in London on 10th October 2006

due to a severe heart attack. He went there with the FICCI delegation.

Sunil Mittal

One of the main faces behind the cellular revolution in India, Sunil Bharti Mittal is the chairman and

managing director of the Bharti group, which owns India's largest GSM-based mobile phone service. Born on

June 15, 1950 in Ludhiana, Punjab, he graduated from the Punjab University and set up a small bicycle

business in Ludhiana, not wanting to follow the footsteps of his father who was an M.P. In 1979, he moved to

Mumbai and started selling portable generators imported from Japan.

Business was good initially, but it ran into rough weather when the government banned the import of

generators as two Indian companies were awarded licenses to manufacture them in India. The year 1986 saw

Sunil Bharti Mittal founding the Bharti Telecom Limited (BTL) which started manufacturing electronic push-

button phones.

His lucky break came in 1992, when the government began issuing licenses for mobile phone services for the

first time. Sunil Mittal bagged the licence for the Delhi cellular circle. In 1995, he founded the Bharti Cellular

Limited (BCL) and the brand Airtel was launched. The rest as they say is history. He has won a number of

awards including the Asian Businessman of the Year by the Fortune Magazine in 2006, the Business Leader

Of The Year by the Economic Times in 2005 and the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2004. He

is one of richest Indians across the world. The Bharti group in 2006 forged a deal with the US retail giant

Wal-Mart to start a number of retail stores across India.

Kanan Bhatt - Author, Business Evangelist

CorporateDramas.com, an innovative genre in business publishing and movie media, is the brainchild of the

young, charismatic and vivacious Ms. Kanan Bhatt. Kanan alternates her stay between Washington DC and

Mumbai. Kanan's romance with the corporate world dates back to her childhood. With her gorgeous looks,

Kanan could have opted for a glamorous career as a model or an actress but she wanted to pursue a more

cerebral profession that would add value to the industry and the society. Instead of Hollywood or Bollywood,

she headed for the Corporate Woods.

According to Kanan, "The corporate world is the most fascinating of all places - the largest structured

congregation in society where people from different backgrounds, upbringing, nationalities, cultures, races,

religions, genders, habits & temperaments come together to seemingly fulfill a common corporate mission;

each with his or her own individual agenda, at times harmonious and at other times disjoint. While we try to

term the time we spend here as the professional work life and many of us try to keep it separate from our

personal lives, little do we realize that this is just a myth to fool our own minds. It is humanly impossible to

compartmentalize the two. Majority of us carry forward our personal idiosyncrasies into our professional

worlds and our professional baggage into our personal space, making each more challenging than the other,

sometimes exhilarating and exasperating at other times. CorporateDramas.com is a realty and fiction series

that gives a voice to this plethora of emotions."

After Bachelors in Engineering and an MBA from premier institutes, Kanan went on to manage complex

technology businesses across the globe. For someone so young and spirited, she displays a much versatile and

wiser disposition on life, achievement and values.

Kanan attributes her strength and confidence to a higher power that she says has always lighted her path. Her

faith in the good old values of Karma combined with qualities of integrity and intelligence provide her with

clarity in thought and action that is sometimes hard to find even in veterans. However, she does not take full

credit for her success and is quick to add how fortunate she has been to have wonderful parents who have

motivated her and given her the freedom to pursue her dreams.

Raised in the vibrant city of Mumbai, in a family of professionals and industrialists, Kanan nurtured a desire

to create value through conviction and perseverance. Kanan struck out as a sharp, focused and witty kid. She

believed in working smart, not just hard and was an aviator at school and college without being categorized as

a nerd.

Despite her successful and illustrious career and her global exposure across Europe, the US and India, Kanan

seems to exude a down to earth personality with an ebullient and bright charm. Being single on the personal

front, Kanan finds time to catch up with creative and entrepreneurial endeavors. She also likes chess, tennis,

music, movies, networking and keeping fit. "As an active and passive participant of the corporate world, it has

been interesting to observe, analyze, experience and understand the vagaries of this world that make and mar

destinies, where companies bloom and wither; icons are built and busted and products are taken from cradle to

grave," says Kanan

Kanan's book "The Mist" drives home the age old theory of the power of purpose. Amidst sensational success

and glittering glory, it awakens the corporate conscience to create heroes with social responsibility and

emphasizes the importance of ethics in business and in life.

Her other fictional masterpiece "The Power of Weakness" exposes us to the negative powers lurking in

corporate corridors that if left unchecked, can shake the very foundations of Business and the fabric of

society.

The CorporateDramas.com series of books will appeal to all stakeholders and spectators of this corporate

world -Senior management, operational managers, functional specialists, legal counselors, auditors and

financiers, stock market analysts, vendors and the engineering, management and other graduating student

population who will be spending majority of their adult life in the concrete, corporate jungle.

Karsanbhai Patel

Achievement: Man behind the hugely successful brand, Nirma. Karsanbhai Patel is the man behind the hugely successful brand, Nirma. His' is a legendary rags to riches journey during which he shattered established business theories and rewrote new ones. Karsanbhai Khodidas Patel (K.K. Patel) came from a humble farmer family from Mehsana, Gujarat. He worked as Lab Assistant in the Geology and Mining Department of the Government of Gujarat. In 1969, at the age of 25, Karsan Bhai Patel started a small-scale enterprise. He offered a quality detergent powder, using indigenous technology, at a third of the prevailing price, without compromising on the product. Karsanbhai named the detergent powder Nirma after daughter Nirupama.

At that time domestic detergent market was limited only to premium segment and was dominated by MNCs. Karsanbhai Patel started door-to-door selling of Nirma and priced it at Rs. 3 per kg. The next available cheapest brand in the market at that time was Rs.13 per kg. Nirma revolutionized the whole detergent powder segment and in a short span of time created an entirely new market segment in the domestic detergent sector market. It gave the bigger established brands a run for their money and soon occupied the top market share. To add to all this, Nirma was made of an innovative formulation, which global detergent giants were later on compelled to emulate, it was phosphate free and hence environment friendly, and the process of manufacturing was labour intensive, which offered large scale employment. Karsanbhai notched up one success after another. After establishing its leadership in economy-priced detergents, Nirma foray into the premium brand segment, in cakes and detergents was equally successful. It built up a 30% market share in the premium detergent segment and achieved a greater than 20% share in the premium soaps market. Karsanbhai Patel has won many accolades on his way to success. The Federation of Association of Small Scale Industries of India, New Delhi, awarded him with the 'Udyog Ratna'. The Gujarat Chamber of Commerce felicitated him as an 'Outstanding Industrialist of the Eighties'. The Govt. of India twice appointed him Chairman of the Development Council for Oils, Soaps & Detergents.

Products of Nirma:

1. Consumer Products

Soaps: Nirma Bath Soap, Nirma Beauty Soap, Nirma Lime Fresh Soap, Nima Rose, Nima Sandal

Detergent: Nirma Washing Powder, Nirma Detergent Cake, Super Nirma Washing Powder, Super Nirma Detergent Cake, Nirma Popular Detergent Powder, Nirma Popular Detergent Cake

Salt: Nirma Shudh

Scouring Products: Nirma Clean Dish Wash Bar, Nima Bartan Bar

Naresh Goyal

Achievement: Founder Chairman of Jet Airways; Recipient of the first BM Munjal Award for Excellence in

Learning & Development in the Private Sector category in 2006.

http://images.forbes.com/media/lists/77/2005/D67A.jpg

Naresh Goyal is the founder Chairman of Jet Airways, India's largest domestic airline. Jet Airways presently

operates over 320 flights daily to 48 destinations, of which five are international. Naresh Goel also figures in

Forbes list of Indian billionaires. Naresh Goyal completed his graduation in Commerce in 1967 and joined the

travel business with the GSA for Lebanese International Airlines. From 1967 to 1974 he learnt the intricacies

of the travel business through his association with several foreign airlines.

In May 1974, Naresh Goyal founded Jetair (Private) Limited to look after Sales and Marketing operations of

foreign airlines in India. Naresh Goyal was involved in developing studies of traffic patterns, route structures,

and operational economics and flight scheduling. His rich and varied experience made him an authority in the

world of aviation and travel. In 1991, when the Indian economy was being opened up, Naresh Goyal took

advantage of Open Skies Policy of the Government of India and set up Jet Airways for the operation of

scheduled air services on domestic sectors in India. Jet Airways started commercial operations on May 05,

1993.

Today, Jet Airways has evolved into India's largest private domestic airline. Jet Airways has been voted

India's "Best Domestic Airline" by several organisations of world-class repute. In 2005, Jet Airways came up

with an IPO and it was a huge success. Jet Airways was recently in controversy over its merger deal with Air

Sahara. The merger was called off and the too airlines are currently considering arbitration.

Along with Jet's meteoric rise, Naresh Goyal too rose in the entrepreneurial arena. He has won several honors

and accolades. These include Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Services' from Ernst & Young in 2000,

'Distinguished Alumni Award-2000 for meritorious and distinguished performance as an Entrepreneur',

Outstanding Asian-Indian' award for leadership and contribution to the global community given by the Indian

American Centre for Political Awareness, 'Aerospace Laurels' for outstanding contribution in the field of

Commercial Air Transport twice, in April 2000 and February 2004. Naresh Goyal also received the first BM

Munjal Award for Excellence in Learning & Development in the Private Sector category in 2006.

Shiv Nadar

Achevement: Chief Executive Officer of Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL), India's largest infotech

conglomerate

Shiv Nadar is the Chief Executive Officer of Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL), India's largest infotech

conglomerate. He figures in the Forbes list of Indian.

billionaires.http://images.forbes.com/media/lists/77/2004/0RUU.jpg

Originally hailing from Moolaipozhi Village,Trichendur,Tutocorin District, Tamil Nadu, Shiv Nadar moved

to Delhi in 1968. He worked as an engineer with DCM Ltd. But the entrepreneur in Shiv Nadar wanted to set

up his own business. Therefore, he along with six of his colleagues launched a firm making office products

like copiers.

In late 1970s, when IBM quit India, Shiv Nadar's HCL stepped in to fill the vacuum. In 1982, HCL came out

with its first computer. Today, HCL derives 80% of its revenue from computers and office equipment. HCL

has also been spreading its global reach. Its Singapore subsidiary, Far East Computers, achieved a

breakthrough in imaging technology, which, among other applications, enables computers to read handwritten

tax returns.

HCL has adopted innovative practices to achieve growth. In the U.S, a software subsidiary, HCL America,

has reaped huge dividends by taking advantage of global time zones. Every morning, the company's Chennai

office receives software assignments from the U.S, just after work stops there for the night. A team of Indian

engineers, with salaries much lower than those of their American counterparts, complete the jobs and send

them back in the evening. In a short span of time, Shiv Nadar has reached pinnacle of success by his

hardwork, vision, and entrepreneurial spirit.

Tulsi Tanti

Achievement: Chairman of Suzlon Energy Ltd, Ranks among top 10 richest men of India.

http://images.forbes.com/media/lists/77/2005/QD9Q.jpg

Tulsi Tanti is the Chairman of Suzlon Energy Ltd, a company dealing in wind energy. He is one of those first

time entrepreneurs who saw potential in an inchoate idea, ventured into it, and made it big. Today, he ranks

among top 10 richest men of India. A commerce graduate and a diploma holder in mechanical engineering,

Tulsi Tanti originally hails from Gujarat and is presently based in Pune, Maharashtra. Tulsi Tanti was earlier

into textiles. He started his textile business in Gujarat. But he found that the prospects stunted due to

infrastructural bottlenecks. The biggest of them all was the cost and unavailability of power, which formed a

high proportion of operating expenses of textile industry. In 1990, Tulsi Tanti invested in two windmills and

realized its huge potential. In 1995, he formed Suzlon and gradually quit textiles. Suzlon Energy is the sixth

largest wind energy company in the world and the largest in Asia. It is presently building what will be among

the world's largest wind parks of its kind at 1,000 MW capacity.

Suzlon is currently concentrating on global expansion drive. It recently acquired Hansen Transmissions, a

Belgian maker of wind-turbine gearboxes. Suzlon is also building a rotor-blade factory in Minnesota and has

invested $60m in a factory in Tianjin, China. Tulsi Tanti is poised to make India a wind-power export hub.

Vinod Khosla

The India born Venture Capitalist, Vinod Khosla is one of the most influential persons of the Silicon Valley.

Vinod Khosla is in Forbes magazine's list of America's richest 400 people. Vinod Khosla is a world renowned

venture capitalist. Vinod is revolutionizing communications.

http://www.bizness.co.il/public/graphics/people/vinod_khosla.jpgHe rose into fame at the age of 27 when he

co-founded the Sun Microsystems with a German student Andreas Bechtolsheim, who was a multi

millionaire. Khosla ran the Sun Microsystems until 1984. In 1986, he joined in Kleiner Perkins as a general

Partner. Vinod Khosla was among the first venture capitalist to visualize that a combination of internet

technology and fiber optics could make communications so fast, cheap and easy.

As a visionary, Khosla has played important role in starting and helping companies that are involved in the

field of multimedia, semiconductors, video games, Internet software and computer networking. The biggest

virtue of Khosla is that he doesn't just spread cash, but nurtures and supports beginners. Vinod Khosla has

won accolades and admiration because of his ability to visualize business opportunities in right perspective.

Khosla is not satisfied only in planning but takes active part in the implementation part as well. Vinod Khosla

was instrumental in creation of Cerent Corp, juniper Networks, Viant, Extreme Networks, Lightera etc. Vinod

Khosla is also one of the founding fathers of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). Background

Vinod Khosla was born in New Delhi in a family of army officers. He earned a B.Tech degree from the Indian

Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. He attempted to start his own company but the venture failed. Vinod

Khosla then went to the United States and earned his M. S. degree in Biomedical Sciences at the Carnegie

Mellon and later did M B A from the Stanford University in 1979. Khosla was a big dreamer and ambitious

from the very beginning. At the Stanford, Khosla found a business idea and partners from the Stanford Club.

They founded a computer aided and design company- Daisy Systems. Vinod deeply believes in closeness of

family and lives in Woodside, CA with his wife and four daughters.

Sridhar Vembu

Entrepreneur Marc Benioff is afraid of him. Venture king Mike Moritz wants to invest in him.

You have never heard of Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of AdventNet, the company behind newly

launched productivity suite Zoho.

Vembu is a low-profile guy if there ever was one. He is also cheap as hell. Yet, of course, you know that

among entrepreneurs, frugality is a virtue. A tremendous virtue.

Vembu has stretched this virtue to extreme limits, and added layers and layers of creativity upon it. The

result? A 100%, bootstrapped, $40-million-a-year revenue business that sends $1 million to the bank every

month in profits.

Doing what? you might wonder.

Selling network management tools, to be precise. But with a unique twist. Vembu employs 600 people in

Chennai, India, and a mere eight in Silicon Valley. Imagine what that does to his cost structure!

Not only that, in India Vembu's operation does not hire engineers with highflying degrees from one of the

prestigious India Institutes of Technology, thereby squeezing his cost advantage.

"We hire young professionals whom others disregard," Vembu says. "We don't look at colleges, degrees or

grades. Not everyone in India comes from a socio-economic background to get the opportunity to go to a top-

ranking engineering school, but many are really smart regardless.

"We even go to poor high schools, and hire those kids who are bright but are not going to college due to

pressure to start making money right away," Vembu continues. "They need to support their families. We train

them, and in nine months, they produce at the level of college grads. Their resumes are not as marketable, but

I tell you, these kids can code just as well as the rest. Often, better."

With that rather unique workforce of 600 engineers, Vembu has not only built an excellent, cash-cow,

network tools business, but he recently launched Zoho, which is getting a lot of buzz in the Web 2.0

community.

Why? Well, Zoho does everything that you would do with Microsoft Office. It also has a hosted customer

relationship management service that is free for very small companies and only costs $10 per user per month

for larger ones. It competes with Salesforce.com, which charges $65 per user per month.

Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, has made an offer to buy Zoho for an undisclosed amount.

Benioff seems appropriately nervous, since Salesforce.com's sales and administration costs are high, eating up

most of his earnings. Can he afford to compete if Zoho undercuts him at such a dramatic scale?

Vembu has turned Benioff down.

Many venture capitalists want to invest. Vembu's situation is one that every entrepreneur dreams of. You don't

need money. VCs are chasing you. Freedom is delicious, and Vembu knows it.

Vembu has a very exciting opportunity ahead of him. What the Chinese have done in manufacturing, he is

showing that the Indians can do in software: undercut U.S. and European software makers dramatically. Not

in information technology services. Not by body shopping. Vembu has done something few Indian

entrepreneurs have been able to achieve--build a true "product" company out of India. This is not a head

count-based business model.

A brief primer would perhaps help put things in perspective. "Product" companies build once and then market

and sell the same thing multiple times to multiple customers. "Services" companies that do custom software

development have to use "bodies" to do customer-specific development over and over again, with limited

leverage. Theirs is a head count-based business model. Recently, popular software-as-a-service companies

have come up with the model of "renting" software over the Web, thereby offering "products" as "services"

while maintaining the scalability advantage of products.

Vembu has first done a network management product. Then he has done productivity suite Zoho as a

software-as-a-service.

True, Vembu is a rare species in India these days. As far as I know, he's one of the very few entrepreneurs

who has been able to execute on the premise of building software "products" and/or software-as-a-service out

of India. He has a big vision, and so far, he has executed flawlessly.

Manisha Nerurkar

Femme Fettle : In US, Indian women too get a taste of tech-tonic

CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA  

PALO ALTO (CALIFORNIA), NOV 13: Manisha Nerurkar remembers the day she was on the road with 27

cents in her pocket and nowhere to go. Her husband had just thrown her out of the house and she did not have

a relative in the United States. But the gutsy Mumbai woman wasn't going to be beaten.

The ride she hitched to a shelter that cold night was the start of a journey of self-discovery. She went back to

school, worked her way through minimum wage, clawed her way between start-ups, and rode the tech wave in

Silicon Valley like any turbo-charged male. ``That was just four years ago,'' grinned the plucky software

engineer from Cisco. ``And this week I have just made my first million.''

While one hears any number of success stories in Silicon Valley involving Indian men, an extraordinary new

development is taking place in the high-tech field. Indian women, for long homemakers, child-bearers, trophy

wives, and occasional wage-earners in the US, are suddenly blossoming in a field that was hitherto thought to

be amale preserve.

The results are already beginning to show. Cisco's vice-president Jayashree Ullal, Yahoo! Content Editor

Srinija Srinivasan, DigitalLink Chairwoman Vinita Gupta, Smart Modular Co-Founder Lata Krishnan,

Rightworks CEO Vani Kola, former Hewlett Packard GM and current CEO of Tioga Systems Radha Basu are

among the achievers who have shown that when it comes to the tech world, they are in fine fettle too. Says

Anu Shukla, CEO of the San Mateo-based Rubric, an e-marketing company, ``Our time has come.''

The biggest success story among Indian women though belongs to Srinija Srinivasan, vice-president and

editor-in-chief of the wildly popular net destination Yahoo! Lesser known than the celebrated duo of Jerry

Yang and David Philo who founded the company, ``Ninja,'' as she is nicknamed by her colleagues (because

they found it hard to pronounce Srinija and also because of her felicity with Japanese) is quite likely the first

Indian billionairess.

At 29 Born in India, Srinija arrived in US as athree-month-old. Her dad taught mathematics at the University

of Kansas and her mom was a Sanskrit scholar who reinvented herself as a computer programmer. Srinija

schooled at Stanford and in her junior year she went to intern in Japan where she met Yang and Philo, two

Taiwanese students who could not speak a word of Japanese, a tongue Srinija had mastered.

Two years later when the celebrated duo launched Yahoo! They pulled Ninja out of a job where she was

working on artificial intelligence, essentially trying to teach a computer the fundamentals of human

knowledge.

Srinija was to be Yahoo!'s ontologist someone trained in the science of sorting information. But this was in

1994 and the net was just beginning to grow and spout uncontrollably. Trying to organise the web was the

nearest thing to cleaning the Augean stables. But Ninja rolled up her sleeve and got to work, creating the basic

structure of the Yahoo directory in 1995. Last year, her pioneering efforts landed her in Newsweek, which

named heramong the 50 people who matter most on the Internet.

While Srinija ploughed a single and successful furrow, other Indian women entrepreneurs balanced jobs and

children. Smart Modular's co-founder Lata Krishnan and Rightworks CEO Vani Kola, both mothers of two

kids, combined a home life and professional success. With $3.9 million in salary and stock options, Lata

Krishnan last year became the highest paid female executive in Silicon Valley.

Says Gita Lal, CEO of the Austin-based Daman Consulting who has powered her 1996 start-up to a $10

million-plus revenue company, ``Indian women are prospering because they find they can do well on their

own when they are not inhibited by the gender and race boundaries in large companies.''

In the immigrant nomenclatura, ABCD stand for American Born Confused Desis, and FOB is Fresh off the

Boat. The success of the Indian women entrepreneurs has provided inspiration to both ABCDs and FOBs. At

a desi Silicon Valley networking event last month, the Sisters Patel wereflitting about trying to capture

interest and raise capital for an online venture called Pardeshi.Com, an e-commerce portal for the Indian

diaspora. ``Patels have become like Smiths and Jones to identified with the motel business. We wanna move

out of that niche,'' says Tejal Patel, a first generation Indian-American fresh out of school.

Indian women are now chucking up history, philosophy, literature, and plain old home-making to go the tech

route in droves. Indian women entrepreneurs are now burgeoning so rapidly that California now has a Indian

Business and Professional Women's Association that promotes education leadership and self-development of

Indian women through seminars and workshops. In New Jersey, a tech training schools actually sends out

flyers to newly-wed Indians in the neighbourhood encouraging the women to enrol in schools teaching new

tech skills.

In fact, the Indian tech magazine SiliconIndia itself is published by Mona Sharma, a East Coast entrepreneur

who is herself moving to theValley to parlay the magazine into an e-commerce venture and go the dot com

route. The idea of women making it big in the tech world is so routine among Indians that a little more than a

year after marrying Chini Krishnan, the boyish chairman of Valicert, an internet security firm, his wife Rama

Sundararajan is already talking of heading her own start-up. ``Of course, I want to be up there too. And there

are enough inspirational stories already,'' says the Madurai woman, networking furiously at a desi tech

gathering. If the current trend and evidence is anything to go by, no one would bet against it.

Subroto Roy

Achievement: Chairman of the Sahara Group Subroto Roy, is the head of the $10bn (£5.5bn) Sahara Group.

Sahara Group has interests in banking, aviation, media and housing. Subroto Roy began his journey in 1978,

when he founded Sahara in 1978 with three workers in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh as a small deposits

para-banking business. Today, the group has diversified into a giant business conglomerate with interests in

housing, entertainment, media and aviation. Sahara Group presently runs a private airline, entertainment and

news television channels, a newspaper, and claims to own some 33,000 acres of real estate across India. It

also sponsors the Indian cricket and hockey teams and intends to move into life insurance, housing finance,

consumer products, sportswear, and healthcare. Sahara Group has come up with one of the most prestigious

real estate projects in India, namely Amby Valley Project. The project boasts some of the biggest name in

Indian entertainment and sports arena as well as some former international Olympic medal winners as its

brand ambassadors. Sahara Airline was recently in news for its merger with Jet Airlines. But the deal fell

through. Sahara Group has a huge complex in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. The complex is known as Sahara

City. Subrato Roy is famous for his flamboyant lifestyle. The wedding of his two sons became talk of the

town. The who's who of Indian elite attended it and its expenditure ran into hundreds of crores. Subroto Roy

calls himself as the group's "chief guardian".

G. R. Gopinath

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Captain G. R. Gopinath (Kannada: ಗೋ��ರೂ�ರೂ� ಗೋ��ಪಿನಾ�ಥ ನಾ�ಯಕ), the Managing Director of Air Deccan is a

graduate of the National Defence Academy and has served the Indian Army. He is considered the father of

low cost air travel in India. He created a whole new market when he launched India's first low cost airline, Air

Deccan.

Capt G R Gopinath or Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar Gopinath or 'Gopi' as he is affectionately called was born

in a Hassan Iyengar family of the remote village of Gorur, Karnataka. Starting his studies in a village school,

he completed his further schooling at Sainik (military) School, Bijapur. Thereafter he joined the distinguished

National Defence Academy and later graduated from the Indian Military Academy as a commissioned officer

in the Indian Army. He then went on to serve the Army for eight years.

Sometime in 1995, the Govt. of India started the reforms process by encouraging entrepreneurship. This

inspired the entrepreneur in him to identify the tremendous potential Helicopter Charter had in India. Along

with an old Army friend he decided to start a private sector commercial helicopter service in 1996. Starting

with just one helicopter, today Deccan Aviation boasts of 10 (Ten) Helicopters and two charter jets operating

from eight major locations criss-crossing the entire length of the country. This company is India’s most

reputed private Air Charter Company with a presence now in Srilanka also.

Understanding the needs of this segment, Capt Gopinath decided to start the first Low Cost, No Frills Airline

of India. Launched on 25th August 2003, Air Deccan revolutionized air travel in India. With a vision to

connect hitherto unconnected parts of India, Air Deccan today connects many remote parts of the country

where no other airline had operated. The airline is operating close to 236 flights a day connecting 55

destinations. As part of its expansion plans, the airline has signed for 60 brand new Airbus and 32 ATRs. As a

result a total of 80 aircraft will be acquired with one aircraft being inducted every month for the next 80

months. Not one to be effected by the instant success and recognition Capt Gopinath still remains the affable

and easily approachable person that he always was, relentlessly pursuing his dream of enabling every Indian

to Fly.

The French government has bestowed the award of Chevalier de la legion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of

Honour) on Capt G.R Gopinath, Chairman, Air Deccan. The award is a recognition of Capt. Gopinath’s

contribution to the development of Indo-French cooperation in the field of aviation.

The award was conferred upon Capt. Gopinath by H.E the French Ambassador, Mr Dominique GIRARD on

Saturday 28th April 2007 at the Alliance Française de Bangalore

Recipient of several awards such as the ‘Rajyotsava Award’ by the Government of Karnataka, ‘Personality of

the Decade Award’ instituted by KG Foundation , ‘Editors Choice Award’ by the Indian Express Trade and

Tourism Awards and “Sir M Visvesvaraya Memorial Award” by the Federation of Karnataka Chambers of

Commerce & Industry, Capt. Gopinath is hailed to have revolutionized air travel in India .

He currently lives in Bangalore with his wife and 2 daughters, Pallavi and Krithika.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._R._Gopinath"

RITA SINGH

Leading Indian Woman Entrepreneur Rita N. Singh of S&A Consulting Group LLP Continues to Win

Top Honors with another Prestigious Recognition as the . . .

2006 Enterprising Women of the Year

Out of hundreds of entries for the 2006 Enterprising Women of the Year Awards, Rita N. Singh - CPA,

Managing Partner/CFO of S&A Consulting Group LLP, Cleveland, Ohio U.S.A. was among 24 women

selected across the United States. The judges also named 23 finalists. Rita and other winners will be featured

in the May/June 2006 issue of Enterprising Women magazine and will be profiled in that issue. Winners are

chosen based upon the growth and profitability of the nominee’s enterprise, her leadership characteristics, and

her outreach and mentoring of other women-owned firms for the future of her business.

"Enterprising Women magazine, the nation’s only women owned magazine published exclusively for

women business owners, honors and recognizes the outstanding achievements of our nation's finest women

entrepreneurs who have had a profound impact on their community through their leadership as entrepreneurs,"

says Monica Smiley, Editor of Enterprising Women magazine.

The Enterprising Women of the Year Awards were presented at a dinner and reception on Friday,

Feb. 24th, 2006 at Disney’s Grand Resort and Spa, Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Walt Disney World Company

was the premiere sponsor of the evening reception, and UPS was the platinum event sponsor. Enterprising

Women Advisory Board, VIP leaders and outstanding women leaders from around the country attended this

event.

"This honor is so richly deserved for all the work you do to help others."

-Diane Bradford

“We are so fortunate to have you as a part of our community here in Cleveland.”

-Angie M. Kazi, Senior Relationship Mgr. Key Bank, Cleveland, Ohio

“Clearly you have had a profound impact in our community and I would like to thank you for the

inspiration."

-Kathy Fawcett, Financial Advisor Morgan Stanley

"A wonderful honor for a truly wonderful individual."

-Tom Sodow, Executive Director Beachwood Chamber of Commerce

Consulting Group LLP

To turn your Challenges into Profitable Answers and Results, visit our website www.sa-consultinggroup.com

Mescos managing director Rita Singh came out of Tihar jail on bail, the business empire she set up in the late

eighties, is in a shambles. This was a group that once ran 11 companies, from shoes to steel, from Russia to

Mauritius. At one time in the heady first half of the 1990s, it lined up investments exceeding Rs 3,500 crore.

Today, the Mescos farmhouse on Delhi’s outskirts in Satbari village, is probably Singh’s only sizeable

personal asset left intact, but it badly needs a coat of paint. A skeletal staff works from a makeshift office that

was once a showroom for Mescos Shoes.

“Everybody makes mistakes, but nobody has been punished the way I have,’’ says Singh in an interview to

The Indian Express, her first in two years. She’s in a modest Delhi DDA flat near Saket, once a bustling guest

house for Mescos Airline pilots.

Rs 527.5 crore in unpaid loans is a pretty big mistake, but Singh, 50, blames her misfortunes not on the banks

but on her foray into politics. She unsuccessfully contested the 1996 general elections from Ghaziabad on a

Congress ticket and the following year, raids by the Income Tax Department in her offices and farmhouse

brought the shutters down on what till the mid-nineties looked like one of the fastest growing empires of a

first-generation entrepreneur.

Singh says much of her unpaid debts figure is made up of interest, which “shouldn’t have been added”.

Reason: the group’s largest company - Mideast Integrated Steels Limited (MISL) - was declared a non-

performing asset in 1999 and thus, she says, interest on the Rs 275 crore outstanding against them shouldn’t

have been calculated from that time.

Former Mescos joint managing director, GN Srivastava, explains that the ‘arbitrary attitude’ of the financial

institutions (FIs) had a lot to do with the downfall of the group. “After the Income Tax raids, the FIs simply

stopped disbursals of loans. At that time, we were just six months away from starting the first blast furnace at

the pig iron plant in Orissa.’’

Work at the doomed steel plant came to a halt two years ago. Until now, the FIs are undecided on its fate, says

Srivastava. It doesn’t seem to matter to him and Singh that the income tax raids weren’t exactly an incentive

for banks to continue funding a group that wasn’t paying back anything or showed any inclination to do so.

“Five crores,” Srivastava says ruefully, “is all we needed.”

The One Who Did Not Get Away The humongous unpaid loans are clearly not problem number one for the

beleaguered Mescos Group.

After the Income Tax department pounced on them, it was the turn of the Central Bureau of Investigation

(CBI) to turn their attention to financial frauds committed by the group. In 1998, the CBI filed two FIRs

against Rita Singh, her husband JK Singh, their daughter Natasha Singh and other company officials.

The charges: forgery, manipulation of accounts, siphoning of funds and setting up of fictitious firms. In July

2000, the Singhs were arrested and it was only in August this year — after two jail terms, that Rita Singh was

granted bail.

Today, Rita Singh admits most of her time is spent with her lawyers, deciding the line of defense to be taken

in the criminal cases. But gradually, the Singh says, they are turning their attention on making a turnaround.

Only a few months ago, Director General Civil Aviation (DGCA) gave Mescos Airlines back its flying

license and two helicopters have now started doing commercial sorties. One was sold off to pay back debtors.

Their other flying machines are parked at hangers in Mumbai, waiting for servicing and spares.

How They Got The Money: It was in the mid-1970s that Rita Singh began her first export firm. She initially

traded in commodities like rice and tapioca and then moved into garments and leather. She married JK Singh,

a former air force pilot and for 24 years, concentrated on exports.

Between1982-1986, their sales jumped from Rs 40 lakh to Rs 70 crore. “It was around 1991 that we

diversified with a vengeance,” recalls Rita Singh, adding, “the Russian and European markets were looking

up and what could be a better boom industry than steel?’’

Jump to 1994, and the Mescos Group was recording what could only be described as a phenomenal growth

graph. The group had unveiled plans to invest a whopping Rs 3,526 crore in diverse fields such as steel and

mining (with an investment of Rs 3,200 crore), leather and shipping.

The most ambitious project was a pig iron plant in Jajpur, Orissa, as a joint venture with China Iron and Steel

Industry Trade Corporation (CSGC). Mescos got a 100 per cent export commitment from CSGC and began

their ‘Greenfield’ project, one of the 16 to be set up in what was conceived by the then state government of

Biju Patnaik as the country’s steel bowl.

The Rs 1,200-crore Jajpur project proved to be Mesco’s undoing. The plant was slated to go on stream by

end-1995. But around this time, its capacity was raised by 25 per cent, and an IDBI-led consortium pledged

Rs 107 crore more of loans. This added a burden of Rs 75 crore on the group by way of interest alone.

Meanwhile, the Singhs announced the baptism of Mescos Kalinga, which would convert MISL’s pig iron into

flat products. The cost of this mega project: Rs 2,000 crore.

The Mescos empire, by this time, comprised 11 companies. The group had acquired two iron ore mines in

Orissa and announced plans to purchase two ships, intended to transport pig iron directly to foreign shores.

Two foreign ventures - tanneries in Russia run by Mesco Marita and a pharmaceutical concern called Mescos

Mauritius were in place. The heavy borrowing showed up in the high debt-equity ratio of these companies but

Mescos wasn’t looking back. Meanwhile, one question was echoing in the corridors of power: are the Singhs

biting more than they can chew?