Boom Country?

Book excerpt: In Boom Country?, Alan Rosling, entrepreneur and strategic advisor in India for over 35 years, explores an unmistakable and profound change that is underway in the Indian business landscape. A fresh wave of enterprise and start-ups; rapid advancements in technology; government reform; and recently developed pools of risk capital, he holds, are contributing increasingly to a massive expansion in new business – all of it underpinned by a deep social change, a willingness to ‘do things differently’, especially among the young. Drawing upon his own experiences and more than 100 interviews with Indian entrepreneurs – representing traditional leading business houses (Tata, Mahindra and Godrej), established first-generation entrepreneurs (Sunil Mittal, Kishore Biyani and Narayana Murthy, among others) and new-generation start-ups (including Sachin Bansal, Bhavish Aggarwal and Vijay Shekhar Sharma) – as well as forces of the government, Rosling provides an incisive and in-depth analysis of the opportunities and challenges, both traditional and contemporary, of doing business in India. Yet, the growing uncertainty of global trends and India’s own record of under-performing despite its massive potential, lead him to one vital question: Can the current upsurge in entrepreneurial activity – imperfect and early as it may be – really reshape India’s economy and propel it towards becoming a true boom country for new enterprise?