Innholdsfortegnelse for 21 November 2022 i India Today

When we think of Indian tycoons, we imagine them to have made their fortunes in the ‘Big City’. In the glass-and-chrome megascape of Bengaluru, the buzzing financial nerve centre of Mumbai, or even the hypermodernity of Gurugram. But that does not quite match the reality, as the 2022 Hurun India Rich List, prepared by the Indian arm of the UK-based research group, reveals. The list, released recently, indicates India’s Rich, or those whose net worth exceeds Rs 1,000 crore, has grown ten-fold to 1,036 individuals in the past decade alone. The other striking development is that as many as 178 of the businessmen on that list—constituting 17 per cent of the total—are based in over 60 of India’s smaller cities and towns. They come from places that may surprise you:…

BHAGAT SINGH: A Life in Revolution By Satvinder Juss PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE INDIA, Pg 544, ₹999 The short life of this nationalist martyr has cast a long shadow in the subcontinent. This substantial biography offers both historical context on the world from which Bhagat Singh emerged and analysis of the complexity of his legacy and the many claims to it across the political and geographic spectrum. NETAJI: Subhas Chandra Bose’s Life, Politics & Struggle by Krishna Bose, edited and translated by Sumantra Bose PAN MACMILLAN Pgs 360, ₹699 A valuable collection of articles on India’s lost nationalist icon by an important scholar who was also a family member and translated by her son. This collection offers fascinating vignettes of Bose’s dramatic life and his relationships with several individuals from Nehru and…

The third of five children of a paddy and tobacco farmer in the Godavari delta, Brahmanandam Potru knew the vaga ries of agriculture were not for him. He studied commerce and for a while took up contract work, first for the government and later for the upcoming Vizag steel plant. Soon enough, he realised his fortunes lay elsewhere. “Visakhapatnam was a fish landing hub,” he recalls, “and the city was abuzz with seafood trade.” Yet there were few players from the state in the export and processing business. He discovered that the Indian Black Tiger shrimp commanded a premium, but was being sold in zero value-added forms and only to Japan. Brahmanandam trained his sights on the US market, “which had a great appetite for value-added shrimp in its Tier…

A Arriving at a hot and then-arid IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) campus in the summer of 1966, I was awestruck by its arresting architecture: exposed brick-work buildings, with large, circular holes, resembling ruins from the past or half-finished construction. These were student dorms, then used for faculty offices, administrative staff, student mess, kitchen and much else. We had the privilege of staying in faculty residences, before moving to the dorms in 1967. Classrooms were in more prosaic temporary sheds, but what went on in them was, for me and most others, revolutionary. Schooled in the conventional classroom dictum of “keep your ears and eyes open, but mouth tightly shut”, the concept of discussions, with students speaking more than teachers, was alien. This essence of the IIM-A case study pedagogic method also entailed grades…

The founding director of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) was barely 38 when he was appointed. That itself is a remarkable starting point, signifying two things. One, that the authorities—guided by Vikram Sarabhai—were willing to bet on a youngster. Second, that the person chosen to lead, Ravi Matthai, who came with just a bachelor’s degree, was going to be a first among equals. The spirit was non-hierarchical from the very beginning. There were many stalwarts who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with this young man. This has been an enduring feature among the faculty at IIM-A. A great sense of democratic collegiality, decision-making by consensus (even if it is sometimes preceded by fractious and noisy quarrels), and all important posts held by rotation. The pursuit of excellence in teaching and pedagogy, has…

I look back on my time at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) with a lot of gratitude. Those were some of the best days of my life, if I can borrow lines from the Bryan Adams song. I had just completed the five-year engineering course at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, and the SPJIMR was a completely new experience. That it was located in Mumbai made a significant difference. Right from the word go, the pedagogy was different. Before we even joined, we were given a lot of precourse work materials. The day we reached, there was a test to welcome us. It was quite obvious that we had to come prepared. There was no time to settle down. For those who came from…

My time at the Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon, gave me some of the best days of my life. I not only felt intellectually stimulated but also had a great time. I was learning things that can’t be taught through textbooks. Several professors whom I met at MDI are my sounding boards even today. I met people who went on to become my best friends, and peers who were some of the smartest people in their respective fields. Once, during an exchange programme, I got the opportunity to visit France. The outlook that the trip offered to me was of help when I took my business global a few years back. Within a year of graduating from MDI, I was an entrepreneur. And in that, the highly connected and helpful…

After a two-year hiatus necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the india today Conclave Mumbai returned to the Maximum City with two days full of insights, entertainment and debates. From politics, law and society to business and films, the platform brought together personalities from a range of areas, who spoke about the most crucial issues facing India at present. Day one began with a discussion on the political climate of the host state, with Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde making an emphatic assertion—that his faction is the true custodian of the legacy of the late Shiv Sena founder, Balasaheb Thackeray. This was followed by conversations on the future of what’s now a divided, broken party, and the insights of Thackeray’s grandson, Aaditya, were illuminating. Also in focus was the legacy of…

The social awkwardness between Himanta Biswa Sarma and Sarbananda Sonowal is evident in public now. Sarma had unseated Sonowal as the Assam chief minister in May 2021, and the latter was awarded a berth in the Union cabinet. Though both leaders have been extremely gracious to each other, of late they are trying to maintain a social distance. On November 3, Sarma participated in the 75th anniversary of the Assam Medical College, located in Sonowal’s hometown Dibrugarh. While the Union minister was in Assam that day, he gave the event a miss despite an invite, and chose to attend the premiere of an Assamese film instead.…

When Manipur governor La. Ganesan, who now holds additional charge of West Bengal, invited Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to his elder brother’s 80th birthday celebrations in Chennai, she promptly agreed. A two-day visit to the city also gave the Trinamool Congress chief the welcome opportunity to break bread with herTamil Nadu counterpart M.K. Stalin and his sister Kanimozhi. Didi seems to be tapping the southern states for an anti-BJP alliance as northern leaders such as Delhi chief minister and AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav have shown little interest. Will her southern sojourn yield results?…

After studying mechanical engineering from the Regional Engineering College, Jaipur, it wasn’t a job Rajat Agrawal took up, but agriculture. He persuaded his father, a government doctor, to give him Rs 1 lakh to buy 35 bighas outside Jaipur to grow vegetables. The use of high-quality seeds and modern techniques after consulting Pusa Institute in Delhi saw him reap profits from the word go. Next, he bought 10 Holstein cows to start a dairy farm. Fate, though, had other plans. Larsen & Toubro were looking for a stockist, and he managed to land the job. With the entrepreneurial bug biting him again, Agrawal entered lead recycling and exited dairy to set up Gravita India. However, following the 1996 Basel Convention, the government banned lead imports, forcing Agrawal to close his…

Among the top three IIMs that I was interested in, I chose IIM-Calcutta (IIM-C) because of its substantial emphasis on analytical frameworks for thinking. Unlike other IIMs, which rely far too much on cases as the pedagogical method and thereby underemphasise analytical frameworks, the pedagogical method at IIM-C focuses on learning analytics frameworks before applying them to the practical scenarios that cases capture. This kind of learning is extremely critical if one must think outside the situations one encounters during the MBA programme. For instance, no policymaker anywhere in the world would have been taught how to deal with a shock like Covid-19 as when he/she was studying such a calamity had occurred more than a century back—the Spanish Flu. In conceptualising India’s economic policy during Covid, I found the pedagogical…

I was admitted to IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) at a very difficult time. In fact, I wrote the IIM exam on January 1, after cremating my father Vikram Sarabhai the previous evening. It was very hard and when I finally got to IIM-A, I had a complete nervous breakdown. Everyone thought that I had been taken on charity and was a very stupid person. It took four-five newly-made friends to basically teach me how to walk again. But the first year was hell. The teachers told me that had I not been Vikram Sarabhai’s daughter, I would have gotten a C. “But because you are who you are, we don’t want to be seen as being favourable to you. So we are giving you a D.” I was basically struggling to get through and…

I joined the first batch of the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B) that was founded in 1973. As a young avionics engineer with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), I was then working at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Thumba. I was eager to pursue higher studies in management, and IIM-B, naturally, came into my radar. Its USP at that time was the resolve to create a professional management cadre for the Indian public sector, and that meant instilling a society/service-centric value system, besides the skillsets for a typical business executive. A doyen of management education, Professor N. S. Ramaswamy was our founding director. Within a year, he brought together 50 brilliant faculty members from India and abroad, and elegantly set up a temporary campus in and around a…

The last exam had just concluded at Delhi University. The results had not been declared. We were in Kolkata where I spent every summer vacation. There was just one nagging doubt—would I get admitted to the XLRI Jamshedpur? The decision would be mailed to our home in Delhi. Baba suggested, “Why don’t you take a train and go to Jamshedpur and find out from the office?” He was in the Railways and believed there was no place in India that the Indian Railway did not connect. But the train station was Tatanagar, and not Jamshedpur. The XLRI was the first business school in India. It was set up by Jesuit priests in 1949, in what was then the state of Bihar. We were taught by several legendary teachers like Prof. Sharad…

The 2022 India Today Group survey of the country’s business schools was conducted by Delhi-based market research firm Marketing & Development Research Associates (MDRA). Starting in 2013, the ranking, now in its 10th edition, has witnessed significant improvements in terms of the number of data points it considers. However, the fundamentals remain the same—providing the most credible and exhaustive rankings of India’s B-schools based on the latest data. Institutes offering full-time classroom management programmes (PGDM/MBA), established at least five years ago and with a minimum of three graduated batches till the academic year ending 2022, were considered for the rankings. The list has been prepared taking into account all aspects of management education. There are five main criteria for the rankings: learning experience, living experience, selection process, placement performance and…

For an Indian viewer, the image of Mumtaz Mahal—in whose memory the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan had the magnificent mausoleum Taj Mahal built—is a familiar one. We’ve seen it in everything from school texts to decorative objects and theatre. So, the sight of the monarch in a pair of jeans in a medieval castle some 160 kilometres from London triggers a strange stirring. It’s like bumping into an old friend after decades—you recognise her, yet she seems entirely different. The mixed media artwork ‘Indigo: The Colour of India’—a combination of traditional hand painting, digital elements and scanned historical archival material—is part of The Singh Twins’ Slaves of Fashion exhibition, on display at Norwich Castle Museum and East Gallery at Norwich University of the Arts till January 22, 2023. Founded by…

The genre prowls about under many aliases: crime novel, detective fiction, police procedural, policier, neo-noir, etc. However you identify it, there are a few key elements that make a crime thriller gripping. The story transports you to a dark, usually urban or peri-urban world of crime and violence; a hypnotisingly mysterious plot that gnaws at you till it reaches resolution; characters that hook you; electrifying action; fascinating investigation procedures; a narrative that immerses you into a particular city and its sub-cultures through tellingly observed detail; and, in the best ones, stupendous writing, which is in itself a reward. For anyone teaching crime fiction writing, Suhit Sen’s The Hunter of Lalbazar is a book that must stay close at hand, like a loaded pistol in the topmost desk drawer. Astoundingly, Sen…

Director Sudhir Mishra’s latest project is an Indian adaptation of the hit Israeli series, Fauda. Tanaav, the SonyLIV series, follows a special unit in Kashmir. Mishra has also finished post-production for Afwaah, a thriller starring Bhumi Pednekar and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, shot a short film with Taapsee Pannu and is writing a series based on his grandfather’s memoirs Q Your past few projects have been adaptations of international shows and a book. I’m a filmmaker, so when I started doing long-form, I tried first to get the hang of it. It helps if you’re working with material that’s partly constructed. Of course, you have to adapt and bring your own self into it. Adapting Serious Men, based on Manu Joseph’s book, was more difficult. While adapting from a book, you go from the…

Q. Six of your career-best throws came in 2022. What did you get right this year? During training, I focused on certain aspects of my technique, like the direction in which I needed to release the javelin. Besides, there’s a change in my mentality, and a greater belief in myself after the Olympics. Unlike in the past, now I feel I am performing at the level of world-class athletes. It has worked wonders. Q. What has the off season been like? I was in Switzerland with my family. I also travelled to Tokyo for a programme, where I refreshed my memories of the Olympic gold. When I’m home, there is less control over what I am eating, like I really dig into Indian mithai. So, once training starts, it’s difficult…

With the Rashtriya Janata Dal narrowly losing the Gopalganj seat in Lalu Prasad’s home town, among the WhatsApp messages circulating in Patna was one about Owaisi ka badla. In November 2020, when the Tejashwi Yadav-led grand alliance fell short of a simple majority, they had pinned the blame on Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM (All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen) winning the five minority-dominated seats. In June 2022, Lalu’s son settled the score by poaching four of the five AIMIM legislators in Bihar, regaining the single-largest party status for the RJD. Now, four months later, Owaisi’s party seems to have got its own back, when the AIMIM candidate bagged more than 12,000 votes in Gopalganj, ensuring the BJP’s victory over the RJD by less than 2,000 votes.…

Known as GLD in business circles and Govind kaka at home, Govind Laljibhai Dholakia was born in a remote village in Gujarat and grew up working on a farm. When he came to Surat in 1964, “I’d work 14 hours a day,” he says, “like the 200-300 other diamond polishers in the city.” One could turn only 28 per cent of the rough stone into a finished diamond, but with persistence and scientific cutting, Dholakia managed to salvage 34 per cent, making it a bigger gem of higher value. “But my employer asked me to replace it with a smaller one. I refused,” he recalls. It became a trigger for him to start his own company, Shree Ramkrishna Exports, in 1970. Where he invests profits Back into business or in…

His lawyer father wasn’t exactly happy when the then 22-year-old Patnaik announced he wanted to go fishing on a deep-sea trawler. The prospect of earning Rs 25,000 a day in the 70s was tempting; the state government, too, was promoting fisheries with easy loans. Patnaik borrowed Rs 5,000 from a cousin and Rs 2 lakh from the Odisha State Financial Corporation to buy a trawler. A spate of losses later, he began delivering shrimp to his friends, who were supplying to food chains like ITC and Britannia. He got his own licence in 1980 and opened Falcon Marine. Back then, he had to first build roads before he could transport the marine produce from the sea to the processing station. Today, he has 3,500 acres devoted to shrimp farming, five…

Financial necessity first forced him to work as a tutor, but teaching finally became a calling for Alakh Pandey. So much so that he quit his engineering course at the Harcourt Butler Technical Institute in Kanpur, becoming “a 50 per cent mechanical engineer”. His background in theatre in school made his physics lessons like no other. Impressed by his style of teaching, his mentor and employer Amir Farooqui predicted he’d teach 7,000 students one day. The thought stuck. YouTube became the answer to his quest to reach more students. Pandey created his own channel in 2015, calling it ‘PhysicsWallah Alakh’. A Facebook page followed. But response remained limited, despite Pandey posting science memes and quizzes and offering ‘mobile recharge of Rs 50 to the right answerer of the quiz’. The…

Looking back on those 18-odd months at the Joka campus of IIM-Calcutta (IIM-C), one cannot but state a by now cliched phrase: “Those were the best days of my life.” But in this case, it is true, even today, 25 years later. While there was a lot of academic learning, the two things I took away from my time there are: how to handle stress and pressure and how to work with and learn to compete with some really smart, talented people who would eventually be colleagues, managers and subordinates in my professional career. The beautiful campus peppered with lakes, the hostels each with their sub-cultures, countless hours of table tennis, cricket and playing Tetris in the pre-internet era, the stress of finishing group projects on time, getting decent grades and…

It was the summer of 1979 when I walked down the distinctive red brick arched corridors of IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A). A little dazzled, a little intimidated but definitely determined to do my best to get the most out of this elite institution. There were students from all kinds of disciplines—from the IITs, humanities, law schools, veterinary sciences to a few from the corporate world. But one thing was common—they were all brilliant and hungry young minds. The pressure was intense and required us to give our very best and more. A friend wanted to quit. We convinced him to stay and today he is a leading consultant in the infrastructure sector. The professors were absolutely world-class. They were generous with their knowledge but also exacting in their expectations. A professor told…

I was nominated by Intel Technologies to the Executive General Management Programme at IIM-Bangalore in 2005, the very year the institute launched the programme. I still remember my first day on campus, awestruck by the academic excellence and grounded thought leadership of the faculty, the brilliant simplicity of the campus, and the outstanding students from across the country. Be it then or now, when you enter IIM-Bangalore, you instantly experience these elements that make the institute truly world-class. After IIM-Bangalore, I went on to study at the Kellogg School of Management as well as the Harvard Kennedy School, and worked at the London School of Economics. Notwithstanding the more extensively global ecosystem of students, faculty, alumni and school activities of these institutions compared to IIM-Bangalore, I believe the latter’s faculty and academic…

It’s been over two decades since I completed my Bachelor of Management, with a specialisation in marketing and system, from the XLRI in 2000, but I still have vivid memories of the institution. All I need to do is just close my eyes and I can visualise, rather relive, my days at the XLRI-Xavier School of Management. No wonder, the XLRI as an institution, its world-class teachers and the inspiring campus atmosphere have left an indelible mark on my life and endeavours. When I look back on life and assess my humble achievements—winning 52 national and international medals and mentoring the Indian archery team to win multiple medals—I find a clear connection with the values I inculcated at the XLRI. The XLRI’s value of giving back to society and doing…

Note: Ranking is based on objective data only. Only those B-schools which submitted their objective data have been ranked. Institutes like IIM-Kozhikode, ISB Hy-derabad, etc. which did not submit their objective data on time or refused to participate have not been ranked. Only those colleges which fulfilled the below criteria were considered eligible for participation in ranking: i. Minimum 3 batches passed out; ii. Offering full time Post Graduate Programme in Management. All scores have been rounded off to one decimal place; this may result in rounding-off errors while adding the parameter-wise score. NP = Not Participated…