Bhakra Dam: The Green Revolution's great enabler

1963
The Green Revolution
The Bhakra dam-enabled green revolution gave India food security and broke the back of Malthusian fatalism.

So many years on, it's easy to forget the thrill that gripped India on October 22, 1963, when the Bhakra Dam was commissioned. It was a winning moment-a moment of conquest. Conquest of hunger-or at least the fatalism with which India's millions were thought to be at the mercy of this scourge.

The Dam, built on the Sutlej river, was a key enabler of the Green Revolution led by the legendary M.S. Swaminathan. Back then, in 1967, India was nowhere close to food self-sufficiency, and poor agricultural performance was often brushed off as some kind of grim Malthusian inevitability. Population growth had to outstrip food output, and population was the variable that had to be controlled-fast.

Today, of course, scientific farming has got the better of the Malthusian nightmare. From some 75 million tonnes of foodgrain output, India managed to hit 131 million tonnes in 1978-79-through waste-free irrigation, better yielding grain varieties and better farming techniques. Today, the figure nudges the 200-million mark. "In countries where more than 50 per cent of the population depends on agriculture," notes Swaminathan, currently Chairman, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, "agricultural progress is the safety-net against hunger and poverty."

His next great hope: an eco-friendly Evergreen Revolution. Today, the spirit of defying doomsayers continues, and India can become a major food supplier to the world-if the WTO gives the country a fair chance.

1970
Operation Flood
A marvel of rural networking and supply-chain efficiency, it turned India milk sufficient.

The National Milk Grid: 9.3 million dairy farmers strong by the end of the programme

Operation flood was India's first triumph of network management on such a vast scale. Launched in 1970 with the redoubtable Dr Verghese Kurien at the helm of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), the basic idea was to organise Indian dairy farmers into self-managed village cooperatives, made commercially viable by a larger programme to absorb excess milk into a National Milk Grid, created to service consumers in over 700 towns and cities.

Modern dairy methods, accompanied by efficient milk-flow management, Kurien knew, could reduce seasonal supply variation, stabilise milk prices and also ensure that the farmers got their due.

The first challenge, as Dr Kurien recalls, was getting management talent. "In 1965," he says, "I approached J.R.D. Tata to supply me with six managers who could work with me for a year, because I said that industrial development can only proceed in India if it rests on a solid agricultural base. But the Tatas fumbled the ball. So I had to set up the IRMA in 1979 in Anand, which produces 80 Kuriens a semester."

It took a few years, but when the ball was set rolling, there was no looking back. As a direct result, India's per capita milk consumption rose from 111-gm per day in 1973 to 202 gm per day in 1998. By 1994, India had moved from milk-deficient status to milk surplus.

By the end of the programme, in 1996, the network had nearly 9.3 million dairy farmers registered with some 75,000 local cooperatives, supplying milk to 170 milksheds.

1974
Bombay High
This offshore rig struck oil just a few months after the 1973 oil shock.

It was a high, undeniably. On February 19, 1974, the country's Oil & Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) hit a major oil and gas field off the coast of Bombay. Take a look at the date again. This was just six months after the Oil Shock of 1973, with crude oil prices trebling to bloat India's oil import bill. Bombay High was a grand relief, with Sagar Samrat spurting out India's own black gold. The rig has drilled125 wells over the years. Till April 1998, the field had produced 2.4 billion barrels of oil and 177 billion cubic metres of gas.

1970s
TCS Exports Software
The business that was to change world perceptions of Indian technical competence, and kick off the race for software supremacy.

F.C. Kohli: The visionary focussed on software exports in the 70s

People knew little about computers, let alone software services, when Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) began operations in 1968 under the leadership of F.C. Kohli, a man aeons ahead of his time. In 1972, this low-profile unit of Tata Sons got its first overseas order, from the City of Detroit Police Department and then another...and another. Over the 1970s, TCS' exports grew...and grew.

Today, the world looks to India as a reliable source of highly-skilled software services. Not just for one-off task execution programmes, but increasingly also end-to-end solutions-which require a conceptual level understanding of the client's competitive edge. The brand 'Indian software' has been sold, and TCS gets much of the credit for breaking perceptual barriers overseas.

TCS, now on the verge of becoming a billion-dollar company, is busy extending itself across the globe. Says S. Ramadorai, Managing Director, "You need to have reach as a global company... reach to be close to the customers, reach to be visible, reach to deliver solutions, reach to leverage the offshore capabilities, reach to attract some talent within the local community." It's a vision that has created an entire industry. An industry that's ready to stand up and be counted as world-class.

1978
Going Global
AV Birla Group's palm oil refinery in Malaysia topped world charts.

Pan Century Edible Oils: Building on a natural advantage

Corporate India was globalising before globalisation became a buzzword. In 1978, the Aditya Vikram Birla group planted its flag in Malaysian soil-with the setting up of Pan Century Edible Oils. Since then, it has become the world's largest single-location palm oil refinery. The plant currently processes over 1 million tonnes of palm oil.

Why Malaysia? Simple. The natural advantage of raw material availability. The group's current chief, Kumar Mangalam Birla, should be proud.

1983
Cricket World Cup
No abstract victory this; it was a collective moment of obvious triumph. For millions together-live on TV.

India lifts the World Cup at Lord's: Winning against impossible odds

The pulse races, the breath shortens, and the fist pounds the air. A reflex. A rush of blood. A victory. June 25, 1983. A collapse of the last West Indies wicket; and the World Cup in India's grasp.

Never had a team made the London bookies eat their hats (along with their odds-billed at 66-to-1 against India) with such joyous abandon. West Indies was the terror team of the time, reigning World Champion ever since the Cup began-but a twist here, some magic there, and India won!

Almost two decades later, the significance of that 1983 victory at Lord's is still to fully sink in. And we're not just talking about the mega-boost to the Indian morale. That goes without saying.

"For the first time," says team captain Kapil Dev, in retrospect, "cricket united the country." It also gave the country a sense of global confidence. A certain bounce in the stride.

Cricket used to be an Englishman's game, also played by a few others as a colonial legacy in a few odd parts of the world. Today, cricket is an Indian game, also played by its originators on some cold faraway island. The game's centre of gravity has shifted to India. Just look at the numbers. An overwhelming share of the money the game attracts globally, is from here.

The 2003 World Cup, to begin soon in South Africa, has three of the four main sponsors (Pepsi, LG, Hero Honda and South African Airways) looking to the Indian market for returns on their investment. That's how it is. Create a Great Eyeball Trap, and the world beats a path to your door. Such is the game's appeal that marketers wouldn't know what to do without it.

Deals on wheels: Cost-efficiency is everything

1986
Hero Becomes Number One
Low costs gave Hero volumes, and volumes, low costs.

In 1986, hero cycles became the world's largest maker of bicycles. The formula? High volume, low costs. Today, it cranks out 19,000 cycles every day. The group's JV with Honda has repeated the model for motorcycles, selling over 1.5 million units a year. Pawan Munjal, Managing Director, Hero Honda Motors, attributes the success to "our customer-centric approach and efficient management of resources and skills".

Value-for-money: For 250 million customers

1989
The World's Largest-Selling Soap
Nirma's yellow powder-a mass-market phenomenon.

In 1969, when Karsanbhai Patel launched Nirma, he couldn't have imagined it would become the world's highest-tonnage (500,000 tonnes in 1987-88) detergent in just under 20 years. And it gave him, in his own words, "a deep sense of satisfaction from the fact that value-for-money offerings from Nirma could convert luxuries into necessities for the Indian Common Consumer." Nirma still sells over 800,000 tonnes of detergent every year.

1991
Licence Raj Dies
In a stroke, decades of misguided economy policy were abandoned to allow market forces in.

Manmohan Singh: Defining India's new tryst with destiny

The euphoria in jeejabhoy Towers, which houses the Bombay Stock Exchange, had to be experienced to be believed. People were literally being swept by waves of joyous heads thronging the building. The din was too uproarious to hear anything the man on the TV screen was saying. It didn't matter anymore. The deed had been done. The Licence Raj had been pronounced dead.

The day was July 24, 1991, and the man on TV was Manmohan Singh, the then Finance Minister. "India stands at the crossroads. The decisions we take and do not take, at this juncture, will determine the shape of things to come for quite some time," the man had said, casting aside decades of misplaced faith in the mixed economy, short-hand for a command economy with a handful of privileged licence-holders. At long last, competition had been allowed in, and the Iron Hand of the state had been replaced as resource allocator-in-chief by the Invisible Hand of the market.

Yet, reforms remain incomplete. As one observer put it, the early reforms were sneaked past the Indian electorate, but now, the free market idea must be sold to the people.

1992
Reliance Raises Global Money
Reliance's GDR opened up the promise of foreign capital for Indian business.

Dhirubhai Ambani: Global dreams realised

In the isolated old days, investors in Manhattan skyscrapers wouldn't have bothered betting on an Indian business to save their nuts. India was simply off their map. So it was a momentous occasion when, in May 1992, Reliance Industries raised funds-in hard dollars, no less-from the international capital market.

And these were not some foreign investors trying to take control of a 'third world' bsuiness, but actual investors counting on the Ambanis to enrich them. A global $150 million vote of confidence, so to speak, in Reliance's quest for world-scale capacities (in polypropylene, for example).

The instrument was the Global Depository Receipt (GDR), which represents the dollar value of the firm's underlying equity. Since then, some 60 Indian companies had raised over $6.5 billion via GDR issues. Foreign capital is now within reach-at last.

1996
India As A BPO Centre
GE picks India as its Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centre.

The world's back-office: Near you

It has become a wave already. It was in 1996 that GE, scouting for a low-cost base to source its back-office business processes to, zeroed in on Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi just South of the capital in Haryana. Recalls Pramod Bhasin, President, GECIS: "When we started, we had no set business models to follow, no prior experience... all we had was a vision and a huge amount of enthusiasm and energy to make it work."

From an employee base of 600, GE's call centre now has more than 12,000 today, and the company's intense training systems have spread far and wide-as more and more business process outsourcing centres mushroom by the month. India is becoming the world's back office.

1998
Sundaram Clayton Wins Deming Medal
The first-ever Indian firm to win the world's most prestigious award for quality.

Total quality: Means, not an end at TVS Group's Sundaram Clayton

For years, analysts would groan about India's poor quality reputation, with the 'it's ok' attitude as their prime suspect. And then, along came Sundaram Clayton, and won the Deming Prize for quality. On November 14, 1998, the company's CEO Venu Srinivasan received the prize instituted in 1951 by the Union of Japanese Science and Engineering (JUSE) in honour of the quality guru W. Edwards Deming. And from then on, the country has been whinging less, and working more-towards quality.

Sundaram Clayton, part of the Chennai-based TVS Group, makes air and vacuum braking products for vehicles, among other things. Thanks to the rigour with which its brakes division had applied systems of company-wide quality control (CWQC), it became the first Indian company ever to bag the award. And the company hasn't rested on its laurels. "Excellence is a moving target," says Srinivasan, "and when we received the Deming prize in 1998, we moved on-as this was the start of the TQM journey and not the end... the prize is just a ticket to the journey." For the record, in 2002, Sundaram Clayton won the Japan Quality Medal, a honour reserved for the best of Deming awardees.

1999
Infy Lists On Nasdaq
For Infosys, raising foreign capital was not the idea. By listing on Nasdaq, it got itself a currency (stock) to hire top talent and make acquisitions across the world.

Infosys' now CEO Nandan Nilekani (top, right) at NASDAQ: Infy goes down the wire

It was another day in cyberspace, with zillions of 0s and 1s zipping up and down the information superhighway. But for India, March 11, 1999, was not just another day in cyberspace. It was the day that somebody sitting in some remote corner of the world could log on to his computer, hit a few keys, and buy himself a part of India's premier software exporter, Infosys Technologies.

That was the day that Infosys' share began trading on America's premier online stock exchange, Nasdaq. The event was beamed live from New York to giant video-screens on a basketball court at the Infosys' Bangalore campus. "This is a small step for Nasdaq but a giant leap for Infosys and the Indian software industry," said Chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy from New York. It was a rare moment of exultation for a man who is otherwise given to understatement as his style.

Within two hours of active trading, the US-listed Infy share touched $50, up $12.88 from the listing price of $34. The share closed the trading day (!) at a healthy $46.88. The company was pleased. But not for the reasons you might imagine.

At last, it had a 'currency' to recruit global talent (via dollar stock ops) and make overseas acquisitions (via all-stock deals). Just accessing funds, in itself, was not the idea. Explains Nandan Nilekani, CEO, Infosys Technologies, "Our decision to list on Nasdaq was based on the belief that it would help us build a strong global brand and attract a wider pool of investors as well as the best employees from all over the world."

Indeed, the Infosys brand has got a boost. Customers prefer doing business with firms that they know are subject to the rigours of GAAP-standard financial disclosure, not to mention the intense scrutiny of global investment analysts. Even otherwise, for a company started in 1981 with just $250 as capital, it was quite some moment. Infosys now commands a market value of more than $2 billion, and symbolises the aspirations of Indian firms that are thinking global.

2000
Tata Tea Buys Tetley of UK
Big fish swallow small fish. But again, not always. India's own Tata Tea took over the UK's Tetley, to become the world's second largest tea marketer.

Global market play: For people who need adrenalin

Business has a certain Darwinian logic to it. A logic that kept Indian business fearful of the Big Bad World overseas, where large corporations with multi-billion dollar outlays could crunch anything of Indian origin out of existence.

Well, here's some news. Sometimes, the small get to swallow the big. On February 27, 2000, humble little homegrown Tata Tea snapped up Tetley of UK, a company thrice its size, for a tidy sum of £274 million (Rs 2,117.05 crore).

Says Homi R. Khusrokhan, Managing Director, Tata Tea, "The acquisition of Tetley has catapulted Tata Tea into the league of a new emerging breed of Indian Transnational Companies who realise that, sooner rather than later, the world has to be their marketplace."

It was a lot of money, and the deal involved the setting up of a fully-owned special purpose vehicle (SPV) in the UK-with £70 million (Rs 540.85 crore) of equity, and an unbelievable £200 million-odd (Rs 1,545.3 crore) in debt. Some analysts even think that the Tata group got carried away by the glory of the moment, and overpaid (rival bids were lower). The Tatas even had to inject an additional £30 million (Rs 231.8 crore) into the SPV in 2001.

But in pure factual terms-of an acquisition made-it was certainly a winning moment. The largest cross-border acquisition made by an Indian company, ever. And a move that turned Tata Tea into a global marketer of tea overnight, and the world's No. 2, after Unilever. In one shot, Tata Tea's consolidated turnover stands at Rs 3,073 crore for 2001-02.

Moreover, the company not only has access to a global market (that Tetley addresses), but also a global tea-leaf procurement system perfected over the years and a vast portfolio of innovative products, including dripless teabags, herbal teas and flavoured teas (with flavours as exotic as black currant, strawberry, apple and cinnamon). The challenge now is to show that Indian marketing minds are as good as any, in addressing the bewildering diversities of the world.

To be sure, Tata Tea's move hasn't sent Unilever into a cold sweat. Tata is at best a distant contender for global leadership. Its worldwide marketshare stands at around 4 per cent, against Unilever's 10 per cent. But the company has an aggressive plan to shake up the tea business worldwide, and stack up the volumes. But developing markets overseas, or even shifting them in any significant way to favour the company, can cost huge sums of money.

The big question is whether the Tata group has the resources to play a global game. The outcome of this test case could determine how ambitious Indian companies want to be-as global marketers.

2001
Lagaan Takes Bollywood Abroad
Lagaan's overseas run could mark the beginning of Bollywood's grab for global eyeballs.

The Lagaan XI: Oscar or not, the Ashutosh Gowarikar movie succeeded in putting Bollywood on the global map

What would be the winning moment for this one? The day- March 24, 2001-that Ashutosh Gowarikar's cricket tale 'Lagaan' was nominated for the Best Foreign Film award at the Oscars? The Friday it opened to packed theatres in India? Or the moment the audience erupted at the cinematic climax? A bloodless Indian victory. Against impossible odds (11 clueless dhoti-clad villagers, against 11 accomplished Anglo-Saxons). And do-or-die stakes (thrice the tax on losing, no tax on winning).

The nail-chewing went all the way to la, for an Oscar. Alas, Bollywood couldn't pull off a last-minute stunt this time round. Oscar or no Oscar, what the Lagaan victory symbolises is Bollywood's ambition to go global, and play on the same celluloid field as Hollywood. For the same eyeballs. If a rustic fantasy could impress American critics, and even draw some $2 million (Rs 9.6 crore) at the US and UK box offices, why not other films?

"A nation is poor when it stops dreaming," says Mahesh Bhatt, film-maker, "and Lagaan has rekindled dreams." The Indian film industry actually sells more tickets than the American industry (3.6 billion, to 2.6 billion), but its value realisation remains pathetically low. Targeting the world market could change all that. The Indian market is estimated at only $850 million (Rs 4,096 crore), while the world market is placed at over $50 billion (Rs 24,09,500 crore). Convergence won't be easy, though.

To enchant global audiences with its unique idiom, Bollywood will have to retain its local essence while adapting itself to the pulse of la. The watchword will be universalisation.