I'm not surprised that India should be throwing up more candidates than before, for Forbes' list of the world's wealthiest. But more important than that factoid is the rise of new entrepreneurs in the Indian system.
In almost any new industry that has grown to prominence in the last decade, the king on the block is not from the established business houses but a rank newcomer.
There is, to start with the obvious example, Sunil Mittal, whose phone company now has the sixth-highest value {Rs 74,000 crore (Rs 740 billion)} among all listed companies - fourth, if you exclude two state-owned giants.
L N Mittal is the richest Indian
Ten years ago, Mittal would not have made it to even the B list of Indian businessmen, forget the A list. Today, when it comes to telecom, he is ahead of established stalwarts like Tata and Reliance, and of a global major like Hutchison-Whampoa. Indeed, he nearly walked off with the World Entrepreneur of the Year award in Monte Carlo last summer.
Then there is Naresh Goyal and Jet Airways, which in barely 15 years has emerged as the largest airline in the country, having upstaged the erstwhile state-owned monopoly, Indian Airlines, and bought up a private sector rival, Sahara.
Half a dozen other start-ups (some started by people with more impressive business histories, like the Modis) have fallen by the wayside, and Jet seems set to take on the new low-cost contenders who are backed by big money - Wadia and Mallya, among others.
Indeed, the other impressive airline start-up is again a first-generation entrepreneur, Capt. Gopinath, who has grown his fledgeling company (Deccan Aviation) by adding one new plane every month for two years.
When it comes to the sunrise sector of organised retailing, the big boys on the block are Kishore Biyani and B S Nagesh. 'Kishore who?', you would have asked a decade ago. Today, Pantaloon and Shoppers' Stop are the ones whom Wal-Mart will have to reckon with if it comes into India, for they have done better than the big boys in the same game, Tata (Trent) and the RPG group.
And when it comes to privatising the country's leading airports, those who have managed to bag contracts and get into the cockpit are again first-generation names that most people would not have been familiar with: GM Rao and GVK Reddy.
Both have interesting histories in banking, power and hoteliering, among other things, and both are now ready to be catapulted into the big league after winning the airport bids against celebrities with household surnames.
The story goes much further. One merely has to mention software and the names that crop up are Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar and Ramalinga Raju. Then there is Subhash Chandra, the owner of an amusement park who pioneered satellite TV in India and who in a few years built a business that rivals the oldest and largest media house in the country; Uday Kotak, who has founded a bank that hopes to become another ICICI; Rajeev Chandrashekhar, an engineer who came back from the US and set up a telecom business before selling out and getting ready to enter freight transport - just when the railways have privatised the container business; Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, who has pioneered the biotech industry in India; TV entrepreneurs Prannoy Roy and Raghav Behl, who are India's news kings; and Jignesh Shah, yet another first-generation entrepreneur in a sunrise sector, who in yet another David-Goliath situation has set up a commodity exchange that is battling for market leadership with a rival exchange set up by some of the biggest financial players in the country. One can go on.
Time was when entrepreneurs with fire in their bellies had to leave India in order to get free rein - Aditya Birla wandered all over South-East Asia setting up companies and factories, and Laxmi Mittal ran away from the country to become the world's steel king.
Today, for all the difficulties of doing business in the country, India has become a fertile ground for breeding new entrepreneurs. The markets are vibrant, capital can be arranged, and technology and de-regulation keep throwing up new opportunities.
If you have a good idea, and the smarts to start and build a sound business, you may even make it to the Forbes list.
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