The Indian IT and ITES industry has done well since the late 90’s to carve out a niche for itself – it probably was the first knowledge driven Indian business that the world recognized and lapped up well. Major initiators for this have been the thousands of Non Resident Indians (read mostly U.S. based) and Indian origin U.S. citizens that went to the U.S. in the 70’s and the 80’s. Most of them went after engineering to grad school and found work there in the U.S. IT industry and earned their reputation through some very hard work spread over decades. Indian IT companies were innovative and scaled up well and the rest is too well known to all of us.

The talk and charisma of all this did go a bit overboard – brand marketing and IT lobby pitched in and it’s been IT all over.

But this is not about IT.

It’s about building India. A country with 1.2 billion people that needs almost everything that you can imagine: energy (Power, Oil and Gas, wind, solar), Cement, Steel, telecom infrastructure, airports, sea ports, railways, cars, health care, education, agriculture produce and entertainment. The list is endless. India needs to employ tens of millions of it’s younger people that otherwise will be forced or tempted to disperse their energy wrongly.

This is that untold story.

India is scaling up refining capacity from 150 to 250 million tones /year, adding 10,000 additional MW power generation, doubling cement and steel production in 5 years, adding 80 million phone subscribers a year, building 55 new airports and hundreds of thousands of kilometers in train tracks and roads. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is all on ground zero and this is about building India. Building India using Indian knowledge, Indian talent, Indian engineering, Indian money, raw material and human resource. There is no playing here on cost arbitrage, no playing on protected Income tax or service tax grounds, no reduced financing cost – it’s about playing out there in the jungle with almost outdated regulations, non business friendly political scenario, high energy, raw material and finance cost. To paraphrase Larsen & Toubro’s mission statement: it’s about Imagineering. Yes, this is where the most creative, innovative techno- commercial battles are being fought every day to build India. And this involves manufacturing, construction, services, and technology – all using Indian talent, for building India.

And the track record has been pretty impressive – Ratan Tata recently liberated the auto consumer with his Nano, Mittal with his steel empire, Ambani’s with their backbone in everything, L&T, Airtel, Suzlon’s Tanti, Agrawal’s Sterlite Industries, Reddy’s Apollo, Singh’s Ranbaxy, Hindustan Lever, Baba Kalyani’s Bharat Forgings, Indian Space Research organization, Nuclear power Corporation, Hindustan Aeronautical, Mallya’s UB ……you could go on for a while. This is the industry that employs and will employ hundreds of millions of young Indians as they step out of their classrooms, this is the industry that will build India and this is the industry that will contribute the most to India’s GDP growth. This is also the industry that has gone global and is acquiring assets and companies outside of India and challenging the stereotype perception and thinking. Behind these big names are millions of small to medium enterprise that still don’t get bank funding easily and pay a whopping 17 percent interest on their credit lines and have to comply with dozens of labor laws that neither support or protect labor or the business. Yet, they are performing with some ‘out of the box’ working.

This industry seems to be on the wings of a dream. The least we can do is to give some more wings to their flight through our salutation.

What do you say?