Dhirubhai Ambani-From the eyes of a journalist
Shri Shekhar Gupta, Editor, Indian Express
Mukesh, Anil, Nita, Tina, all members of the family and friends.
I was told to speak on behalf of the media. I’ll speak as a journalist, because I only got to
know Dhirubhai Ambani, as a journalist, some four years back. I was told to come and
have lunch with him. Lunch was such an enjoyable experience and such a unique
experience, that we did it several times afterwards. The one thing I noticed after that
lunch and I came home and told my wife, I said, there is something funny when you walk
into that room. There is an aura of intense energy and somehow, urgency. And what
then happens is you do everything faster. You talk faster. You also talk louder for some
reason. You eat faster. You think faster. And you are out faster than you think. There
was never a second wasted.
I make my life, dealing with all kinds of people and mixing with all kinds of people, good
and bad. But I have never in anybody’s presence felt such a sense of energy and
urgency and such an aura of things just moving. Even the lunch on the table was always
so eclectic. You had to constantly run your eyes on the table to see what’s where. There
were dosas, idlis, some food from home, some sprouts, there were several kinds of cut
fruits, and there were noodles. By the time you figured out what was where, the lunch
was almost over. But by the time it was over you realise you talked about so many
things. And so many ideas had floated in that room that it gave you a sense of what kind
of a personality he was.
I got to know him in a phase when he was not managing the business on day-to-day
basis. He had two very able sons to do that. But he talked about many things, including
India-Pakistan relations, the larger political economy of the country. And I always came
back thinking that this man could be the Ross Perot of India, except that he could
perhaps win the election. Because he had very radical ideas and was never shy of
mentioning them.
The big thing about Dhirubhai was, and which is something many of us in Delhi realised
much later, is that he was willing to think big beyond his times. He was the product of the
licence quota raj and one of the most unfortunate aspects of the licence quota was that it
fixed limits for you in business. It said you would do only this much and no more. And if
you dared to do more than that you were punished. And somehow that mediocrity
became our national credo. In every field we fixed limits for ourselves. Even our athletes
and sportsmen never went beyond mediocrity because they thought that if they achieved
some mediocrity you were okay.
I think Dhirubhai very early decided that he was going to defy this. I’ve said sometimes
that there is a great divide between Delhi and Bombay. In Bombay people think you can
make money and they make money through enterprise and with that you can buy somepower. In Delhi we think we have the power because we live in Delhi. We have politics,
we have the joint secretaries, we have the levers of power. So through that power we
can make money by taking bribes, by taking gifts or just by harassing and blackmailing
people who make money through enterprise.
Most Indian businessmen, I say this with apologies to those who are here, most Indian
businessmen in the past had accepted that principle. This was a kind of compact. We
shall do this and you shall do this in Delhi. Dhirubhai decided to defy that and he defied it
very very efficiently. When I looked at the Tata Safari ad, which said, Make your own
road it reminded me of Dhirubhai and the business he built. When there were no roads
available he built his own road and so successfully at that.
If I speak on behalf of the media, what have we lost? In the media we have lost a very
very interesting personality. And a very newsy personality. We always cover business
and we'll continue to cover business. But I think it is very unlikely that the world of
journalism in India, the media, will find a personality as interesting and as newsworthy
and as inspiring as Dhirubhai Ambani.
I remember and many of you remember that my paper and Dhirubhai fought a famous
battle many years ago. And if I look back on those files, I can see that this was a battle
between two very very formidable rivals, who I am sure deep down, also admired each
other a great deal. And I have gone back to try and pick up the history of those times
and that really was the case.
I was sitting with my friend and guru Arun Shourie, who was then the editor of the paper
the other day. Reflecting on those times, he said with satisfaction that journalism is
based on issues and issues of the day. So while there was a background and there was
a history of a great battle between a media giant and a corporate giant it did not
constrain Arun’s own actions and his own judgement when it came to certain decision
vis-à-vis his ministry and Dhirubhai Ambani’s company. I have no hesitation in naming
the IPCL issue, where there were tremendous pressures on Arun to bend the law, to
twist the law. He was reminded of many old stories and instances but he stuck to the
principle, which is that in the media and out of the media we make our minds on the
basis of the issues of the day.
Dhirubhai was somebody who had blazed such a trail of success and such a trail of
good business practices, particularly after the licence quota raj he was the first one.
There were many Indian businessmen who prospered during the licence quota raj, but
who withered away immediately as reform took place. Dhirubhai was a unique
personality who built his empire during the licence quota raj and prospered much when
the licence quota raj was abolished.
Dhirubhai was such an interesting personality and he was so full of humour. I cannot
conclude this without telling you about a small joke that I once told him at his expense.This was around the time when the first signs of India-Pakistan tensions had come up
and it looked like we were getting close to a war. Somebody mentioned on the table that
Reliance was always told why are you setting up these huge refineries so close to the
borders. They could be bombed in the event of a war. And I had to put one past
Dhirubhai. I said that you (Dhirubhai) don’t have to worry about anything. Nothing would
ever happen to your refineries. And he asked why. I replied, by the time Musharaff orders
his air force to bomb your refineries he will discover that his Air Chief holds a hundred
shares in Reliance Industries. Because I am sure he would've taken care of all this. He
had a great laugh with all of us and we parted on that note. It’s a great pity there wasn’t
one more meeting after that.
So let me conclude this by saying this on behalf of myself and the lot of the media, that
our business is made interesting by personalities, good, bad, but particularly those that
are enterprising and those who can think new things all the time. To that extent
Dhirubhai is somebody that we would miss forever. I do not think, again with apologies
to everybody else who is from the world of business here, I do not think that for a long
time we'll find a replacement.

Innovating Continuously and Intuitively - The TATA Experience
Mr. R. Gopalakrishnan (Executive Director, Tata Sons)
IIMA - Institute Lecture Series

One of the things I have learned in management is not to take things too seriously. Say what you want and make it look as if it fits the subject. I will follow the example of many IIM students who have successfully learned to answer the question the teacher should have asked, rather than the question actually asked. I will cover the subject in three parts. Just to get a few words about what innovation is, to present the context. I also want to share with you some of the Tata experiences about innovation.

People use these three words – invention, innovation &
ingenuity. An invention is the first occurrence of an idea.
An innovation is a programmed implementation of an
invention. And ingenuity is an intuitive form of
innovation.
Those who are in academic
institutions know that there are
lots of ideas which never get
implemented. So innovation
i s t h e a b i l i t y t o
c o m m e r c i a l i s e a n d
implement it and make it
useful for society. If I said
that opening a tea shop is an
innovation, you would say
that’s a bit thick. But imagine
there is a Tamil Brahmin boy,
going up to his dad and saying, “I
want to open a tea shop on the highway.”
His dad will feel utterly disappointed and say, “I want
my son to study, if possible, join IIM Ahmedabad as a
Professor, but he wants to open a tea shop.”
The same act, if done, by a Gujarati or Marwari boy,
would receive great applause from his parents, who’d
say, “Here’s your first five thousand rupees; open your
tea shop. Build it up into a restaurant, then a five-star
hotel and I will be very proud of you. To hell with
studying B.Com & M.Com!” Now, the act is exactly the
same. In one context, it looks highly innovative; in
another, it does not. You do something in your
company; someone may say, what’s the big innovation?
If a farmer in India learned to use hybrid seeds first in
1965, it is innovation. To say that that hybrid seeds were
used 10 years earlier in the US does not detract from its
being innovation. That’s my context.
There is another great example: there were two tribes.
One used to exist in Nevada, a desert area; called the
Shoshone tribe. Another lived in the Kalahari. Both
lived on the fruits of nature, which were sparse. The
Shoshone had access to small berries from shrubs and to
eke out a livelihood was not difficult. So in their nature
of social interaction, there was a man, woman and two
kids. They did not need large amounts of cooperation
and could survive with a few berries; not being a very
collaborative community. The tribe, therefore, grew up
in small units which had limited ambitions and achieved
what was necessary.
For this other tribe in the
Kalahari, there were no shrubs
with berries. The only thing
you could eat was giraffe.
Now, if you want to
overcome a giraffe, you
must get all the men
together and plot, learn to
socialise and collaborate.
Then, you need all that
muscle power to tear it apart
and pull out the meat. Also,
there were no refrigerators in
those days; you could ask everybody
to come and eat. The second tribe, therefore,
grew to be a highly collaborative type of community

Live examples of innovation
When Nirma asked 25 years ago, “why does a detergent
cost Rs.15 a kilo? Why can’t you sell it for Rs.5?” It was a
huge innovation. And the fact that the person didn’t get
a Ph.D for it or did not have 25 patents in his name does
not detract from the quality of innovation, because he
built a million ton detergent business within a period of
six years, which was absolutely fantastic.
The second example is Arvind Eye Care. While it costs
between 2000 to 5000 dollars for a cataract operation in
US, Arvind in Tamilnadu does it for about three dollars
and Prahlad has written about it. Now, Tatas have
brought a small vehicle which falls into this category.
Amul is also a huge innovation. You may argue that the
New Zealand Dairy Cooperative has also existed for 100
years, but that does not detract from the innovative
nature of Amul. The dabbawalas of Bombay are another.
The last is the family planning campaign.
This point about innovation can be applied to products
and services, to processes – chemical mechanical &
engineering – to societal applications etc. When we were
young, we didn’t know families could be planned. They
used to run a campaign with a red, inverted triangle.
What it said, in early 60s, was: “you’ve just got married;
don’t have children for ten years.” And that had a
complete disconnect with people. Because in Indian
society, if you don’t have a child within two
years, there are too many nosey uncles
and aunties asking questions you
wish to avoid. After you have
one or two, they don’t inquire
that much. This little practical
insight took five years of
government money. DAVP
changed the advertisement to
say: “it’s nice you got married
and had a baby; abh do ya teen
bas - give yourself a break.” I
like to believe there is some
connection with the reduction in
population growth. It shows you to
create a context for an innovation to be
understood and to be innovative.
Some people use the words incremental and disruptive.
The Amul Revolution took time for everybody to fully
comprehend – its major societal implications, gender
equality, economic liberation, bringing women into the
society. Its disruption became clear with time. Now
management academics write disruptive innovations
happen due to a number of reasons; for example, by
creating exceptional utility. Fair & Lovely, which many
feminist today mock at, was a disruptive innovation,
insofar as it created an exceptional utility for a very latent
desire; whether the desire was legitimate or not, whether
it was right for commerce to satisfy that desire. It came
out of a simple insight that people spend billions for fair
people to get dark (tanned) , why can’t we spend a few
hundred to make dark people fair?
The second way is to set a strategic, unbeatable price.
Nirma was an example, so is Nano. The third is to build a
different, profitable model. Until 1982, tea was available
in only two forms, in a paper bag or cuboids . Tata Tea
saw people going to hill stations come back with tea for
relatives. Garden fresh tea has implications, even
though it is burnt and beaten in a factory. Therefore, an
experiment was done, where they took fresh garden tea
(not green, but original, single tea, not blended) and
packed into a pouch. That’s revolutionary; it’s never
happened in the tea industry in the world before. The
linkage of a pouch to freshness was established .
The fourth way of disruptive innovation is by
overcoming adoption hurdles. When you have a
disruption, it is difficult to adopt it. Until 1957, there were
no detergents in this country; there were only soap bars.
Surf, Det and Swastik were launched. These were
detergent powders. Surf required a bucket,
but Indian homes didn’t have
buckets. The wealthy homes
did, but these were those of
old steel or aluminum
which was left rings. The
detergent industry said:
how will they have a
soaking wash if they
cannot have a bucket?
A n d t h o u g h t h e y
promoted the plastic
bucket industry, bright
plastics came into business
because of Hindustan Lever and
Tomco. But how many people could
afford a plastic bucket? And so the idea that the adoption
hurdle being the bucket, you better convert it into a bar.
Until then, the wisdom was that the detergent bar will
not function without getting soggy. So the Rin bar came
in and these are disruptive innovations.
Types of innovation
I want to talk a bit about types of innovation. Often, people
talk about innovation in standard typologies. It must be
a product they can describe. So ipod, apple, google, are
considered great innovations, which indeed they are. We
all also often refer to products and processes as
innovation, but you can also innovate the whole business
model; a whole method of getting revenue and
organizing things. The dabbawala is an innovation of a
business model, so is Amul. It is not of a particular
product; the same milk came out, the same powder came
out. And then the last one is social applications.
In the world of innovation, it is thought to be mercenary
and commercial in nature and the NGO world is seen to
be different. But there are ways in which innovation is
applied to social applications. People have spent billions
trying to understand the consumer, capturing market
share, branding it, advertising it, all with being better
connected with consumer needs. They call it innovation.
Consumer companies have wasted money and found
little innovation. This has started to change, because
innovation is not about spending billions understanding
consumers. True innovation is about producing
something difficult for somebody else to replicate,
which gives you a comparative advantage.
So Nirma designed a detergent, not just formulation and
packaging, but buying, sourcing, distribution &
delivering at four bucks a kilo, I worked in Hindustan
Lever; we tried replicating, it was damn tough. To create
another Amul is tough, because there is something
unique about it. The more you are at the higher end of
innovation, the more unique it is.
Products and services: What’s innovative about Tata Ace?
It has four wheels; it carries stuff. Well, there is no piece
of equipment which runs on four wheels which is raised
to selling over 200,000 vehicles per annum within two
years. Likewise, the Ginger Hotel. One could ask,
what’s so great about a 30-dollar room? In the US, they
have premium and budget hotels. That’s not the
innovation, but the construction of a system which
would bring a cute, clean hotel room into the buying
range of a large number of people who are common
sales reps, people who didn’t want to spent 5,000 or
10,000 in a five-star hotel and to create a profitable
business model around it -- that was an innovation.
Process innovation rarely gets recognition because it looks
boring. They have got a Larox filtration process but if you
look at what’s clever about it, Tata Chemicals have got
material they pull out of the sea. They use whatever they
want to and are left with an effluent. Now the temptation
is to put the effluent back into the sea, but it has many
good minerals. And so, for the first time in the world, a
new set of filtration and separation techniques was used
with French equipment; whereby you are able to pull out
those inorganic materials used for making cement. Tata
Chemicals has converted them into cement. There will be
many such examples from the steel industry and others.
For business model innovation, I have chosen TCS. You
may say, it is an off-shoring, what’s new? I began my
career in IT; it was called EDP then. Computers looked
like they were from a museum – huge, refrigerator-like
gadgets with tapes turning. They were not sitting on
your desks. And software was not an industry. It was
very difficult to explain my job to my grandmother,
because she just didn’t understand: what is this
software? I am mentioning these points not to give you a
commentary on my grandmother, but to tell that there
was no industry.
At that time the idea arose, (mercifully Mr. Fakeerchand
Koli is still alive) that why can’t we use the fact that we
are 12 hours out of sync with the United States to start
doing some work for them? To say that I will get data
sheets flown in from the United States, punch cards,
feed them into a computer, put them on tapes and send
tapes back for processing; there was an enormous
innovation. Today, Tata Consultancy is acknowledged
by many as the inventor of the off-shore delivery model.
And the model has not only been replicated; it has been
improved upon, extended to other areas like medical
transcription, legal transcription and so on.
Innovative structure of Tatas
There is something I consider to be business model
innovation which is not much recognized. At the time
you are innovating, you don’t know it; it just turns out to
be so later. If I asked you how is the Tata Group
structured, you will say, there are 150 companies, Ratan
Tata on the top; it’s called Tata Sons, which is actually
the father and under that, there are various companies.
And you will draw the typical organogram, a mechanical
engineer’s delight, showing grandfather on the top and
great grandsons at the bottom. In reality, Tata Group is
the other way round.
Tata Sons is at the bottom and is actually owned by the
trusts. It’s like a biological metaphor, rather than an
engineering one. From the roots, spring the values or
whatever you stand for or what is the purpose of your
business. And it starts having off-shoots or branches and
so you find the older companies which are well known,
like Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Consultancy and there
are higher off-shoots which are even younger
companies. Right at the top, at the canopy of the tree, you
see the youngest companies. People often ask me how
will you manage to give attention to all these numerous
companies that you have? Because they regard it as the
other way around; it’s embedded at the bottom as the
‘great grandson company’ of a grandfather. And I show
them this chart: this is other way round, grandfather is at
the bottom and the great grandsons are up in the canopy.
And it’s through this method, the Tatas have been
uniquely innovative for over 120 years.
How do you get to be innovative if your younger talent
and your younger companies are not sitting at the top? In
a management institute, you are supposed to say with
clarity until you are challenged to the contrary, so I will
make my statement with boldness that I have never
come across a single such example anywhere in the
world, where the holding company is private and the
‘son’ company is public. Unilever, P&G, IBM, ABB: the
holding company is listed and you have 100%
subsidiaries. Here, it is the other way round and who
owns the holding company? Two-thirds is owned by
charitable trusts. So if I work very hard to make an extra
dollar for the company legitimately, my boss’s name
doesn’t appear on the Barons list. My company’s name
doesn’t come there at all, because some charitable trust
has got richer and in a small way makes me feel good, not
because I mind my boss getting rich, but I like the
charitable trust getting richer. Don’t tell my boss, I said
all this.
My son works in Fidelity in Hong Kong and says, “Dad, I
just met our Chairman, and he said, I wonder how Tatas
have existed for over a 100 years. Can you get your father
to send me a little material on this?” If the average
Fortune 500 company has a shelf life of 30 years, they say
the average CEO lasts under three years. I am damn
lucky, I have lasted 10 years. If somebody has lasted 120
years, it seems worth studying. An anthropologist who
finds three old people in Uzbekistan, who are baked
under the sun for 140 years and they want to know how
they lived that long and then they find that they
smoked 500 cigarettes a day and they come to a
conclusion and publish a paper that 500 cigarettes a day
assures you a long life!
Trusts, Tea & Salt
In 1887, Jamshetji Tata began Tata Textiles; until then, it
was a trading company. He adopted ring spindles.
Today, when I am sitting in textile city, ring spindles
would look like very old hat. Jamshetji Tata got the idea
when he visited textile units in America which had
adopted it, but which were not adopted in Lancashire
because it would result in joblessness. And he said,
“Since I haven’t employed anybody, in the first place,
why should I not be world class;” (you know, think 1887).
He called it Empress mills, because Queen Victoria was
declared Empress of India and putting ring spindles was,
in the context of those times, very innovative.
1892: Tata Trusts. One could argue, what so great about a
trust; why call it an innovation? This Trust came into
existence before the Rockefeller Trust, the Ford
Foundation, the Kanagi Foundation, among others. In
fact, it’s probably the world’s first trust. And this was
not a Trust to create a temple in the village, which were
common in the Indian mercantile community or to dig a
well for your community, or open a school, but it is an
open trust for anybody. This Trust has, since then, sent
out 3000 people, two of whom have become Presidents
of India, one a Director General of CSIR and many have
reached great positions of distinction - Atomic Energy
Commission Chairman etc. So it’s a trust that worked
well and had tremendous societal implications.
India Hotels were opened in 1903 and the story goes that
it’s because Jamshetji Tata was refused entry into the
Watson Hotel. But that’s not the innovation. The
innovation is that it is the oldest Indian joint stock
company which is still with the original promoters and
listed in the Bombay Stock Exchange. Now to maintain
your amanat for 100 years and still be with the original
promoters, it’s like Uzbekistani fellow, who has been
living for 140 years. So there must be something unique.
I want to touch up on 1982, Tata Tea and Tata Salt. You
will say, what’s so innovative about Tata Salt? Salt used
to be imported, in the old days, from Aden. That’s when
Gandhiji led the Dandhi march. There was no indigenous
salt available anywhere. In 1982, Mitapur, a town on the
coast of Saurashtra, had no water. How do you run a
factory without water? A brilliant chemical engineer
came up with the idea, we have got plenty of sea water.
So what do you do with the salt that’s left? Call all the
distributors of soda ash; it is a by-product disposal. One
of the distributors said he would take it; we could
outsource everything to him. Remember, the word
‘outsourcing’ was not known then. Under MRTP, it was not
allowed to outsource in those days of FERA and we had
lots of regulations.
The man said, “I will lift all the salt from your factory and
take it all over the country, set up packing units, put it
into packets using local labour; just allow me to use the
Tata name, because if I write ‘Patel Salt,’ it won’t sell. So
we said OK. Benetton did this in the field of apparel.
They made lots of money, became a global company and
became a Harvard Business School case study. But Tata
Salt is not a Harvard Business School case study or even
an IIM Ahmedabad or Tata case study. Even we didn’t
think, we did an innovation. But everything was
outsourced. There is not a single salesman, not a single
invoice, everything went.
I mentioned Tata Tea’s acquisition of Tetley because it is
the beginning of a phase when Tata companies learned to
buy companies four times their size. It is not easy. Were
leveraged buy-outs unique in the world? No, but in our
context, it was unique just like the introduction of credit
cards into India. When we were all young officers, we
didn’t know what’s a credit card. When they were
introduced, we didn’t want to carry one because
somehow it looked “khota.” You know, carrying good
clean notes was the right way to pay your bills. It took a
lot of time for people of our generation to get used to it .
Our kids, of course, take it for granted. This is equal to a
corporate credit card, that you can go on and put down
your credit card, sign a cheque and buy a company four
times your size.
Remember, in those days there was no bank finance, no
scams, no sub primes. You worked hard, got every rupee
and spent it. And Tata Tea was the first one to be able to
structure a deal with the cash flow of the purchased
entity and financed its own purchase. It is a huge
innovation. Since then, many other deals have
happened. The purpose of putting some of these here
was to demonstrate to you that we tend to take many
things around us for granted and don’t regard them as
innovations. We have trained our mind through the
media and the way we are training to talk and look at
things in a certain matrix. It you find a company with lot
of R&D expenditure, you say, they must be very
innovative. If they have lot of patents, you say, they must
be very innovative. If there are business model
innovations, somehow you have not thought of, it as
innovation. If it’s a societal application, you certainly
didn’t think of it as one. Innovation is like spirituality;
it is something basic to yourself.
If you take the biological metaphor, nature exemplifies
actions which are natural and not programmed. In
physics, everything is programmed. In biology, nothing
is programmed, at least you don’t know the programme
algorithm. Have you ever seen a bird trying to fly? Birds
just fly. Have you ever seen fish trying to swim? They
swim. Have you ever seen companies trying to
innovate? Plenty. Have you ever seen managers who are
working very hard with funnel gate and all that stuff to
try to innovate? Plenty, all over. why is it that
management has to be programmed; why can’t it be
natural? What is the real job of a manager? It is to add
value, and you don’t need a lecture in IIM Ahmedabad
to know that innovation is a key to adding value.
Unconscious innovation
My best example is Toyota's production lean
production system. When they were asked how they
did, it the engineer replied," Is there any other way to do
it?” They are not aware they are innovative and when
the whole world said this is fantastic, they said, how can
you guys be so dumb not to do it this way? That’s
unconscious innovation. After Amul happened, once it
is written up, it’s fine, but in those first five years, if any of
us could be be a fly on the wall and hear those debates –
the way it happened! They were unconscious, they were
not trying to be innovative.
If you are unconsciously innovative, but unfortunately
only modestly so, then you are okay. You can also be
innovative in a conscious way, having huge innovation
programmes. The Chairman makes speeches, you put
up things in the canteen on ‘innovation is the breath of life;’
all that kind of stuff. Go to any company, you will find all
these things. But I think the nirvana (and I call that
ingenuity) is to be unconsciously innovative. And when
somebody else comes and says that’s fantastically
innovative, you say, okay, if you say so. Arvind Eye Care
still wonders why everybody is marveling at it because it
is unconsciously innovative.
And therefore, there is a journey that companies and
people had to make, which is that you want to move
towards your nirvana and somehow try to become
engineers and adopting more and more programmatic
innovation is a perfectly good way. I am not against it,
don’t get me wrong. But I am saying
The ultimate thing is to liberate the inherent innovation.
When a child is born, he/she is innovative and then we
put blankets around that child until it becomes you and
me. We are the creatures of inhibitions to innovation!!
a promotion of innovation. Therefore, the key to
becoming innovative is not to introduce new
techniques of innovation, but to remove the
“distechniques” of lack of innovation. And that’s a hell
of a job. Because once you develop a set of habits, it’s
dam tough to remove.
In the Tata group, we are trying hard and we are at the
early stage to remove inhibitions to innovations. We
draw our inspirations from biological systems of fluid
organizations.Any biological system has four
characteristics, including permeable boundaries and
interaction among cell systems. You will find few critical
rules; it is not engineered.Take a simple leaf of tea. The
act of plucking it from a bush and converting it into a
piece of black tea is a marvel of microbiology. Multiple
flora and fauna will affect the way it oxidizes.Align
aspirations andcreate flexible architecture for the
company to be able to achieve those.
Innovation &
India

I am not saying
t h i s i n a n y
jingoistic way,
but the Indian
gene is unique
in its capability
to innovate. I
have travelled to
many countries
and can tell from
a n e c d o t a l
experience that
t h e I n d i a n
g e n o t y p e i s
u n i q u e l y
innovative. And
I attribute it to
many factors but
t h e m o s t
principal one is
its plurality. Plurality of culture religion, languages.
This country wasn’t ruled by anybody for 5000 years.
There was no national government except during the
Mughal period, a bit during the Guptas and with little
luck, you can credit the British of having produced a
national government. We have been a self-governing
society for 5000 years. It is not recognized these days that
when the British left, more geographical area was out of
their control than within British control.
If you add up 550 princely states, that added up to more
than the parts that Britain supposedly “controlled.” We
are and have been, as Rajaji said, a “governmentless
civilization for 5000 years.” And that’s the absolute
metaphor of a biological system where there is no central
command and control and each organism is working on
its own in nature’s self-balancing method. That’s how
society has developed. That’s how the society which was
predicted in 1947, to excel and rupture, is excelling in its
plurality, despite a few unfortunate episodes here and
there - those are checks and balances. That is the reason
why you will find Gujaratis in Kenya, Tamils in
Malaysia, Keralites in the Middle East and Sardarjis and
Sindhis everywhere.
I t i s t h a t
innovativeness.
a n d
entrepreneurshi
p t h a t i s
embedded in
your genes and
h a s b e e n
unconscious. In
any paper on
innovation, you
will not find
India featuring
with the number
of patents, R&D
expense. And
yet, as your own
observation will
tell, the number,
range and scale
of innovation
that you see
a r o u n d i s
fantastic. Tatas
are a very minor part, but there are many lovely
companies we have and our society itself will provide
fuel to build on this unconscious innovation into
something that makes India a global force in innovation.
I think that destiny awaits us. And I hope all of you will
be a part of the winning team, while we will be wherever
we are watching with pleasure. Thank you very much .