City of dreams

While initially mega-tycoon L.M. Thapar was chairman of the fledgling company, the fact that most of the work is centered out of Mumbai required him to opt out of chairmanship. He clearly prefers to spend more time in Delhi. The current chairman Ajit Gulabchand, the man who conceived the project also runs HCC, and is in fact one of the country’s better known construction tycoons. With his substantial base in Mumbai, he alone can spend more hands-on time over the project. Also understood to be involved is India’s biggest hatcheries queen Anuradha Desai, whose business has been boosted substantially in the last few years thanks to the SARS virus that is sweeping through the chicken factories of South Asia.

The big question that is being asked of course at the moment, is how this mega project is going to be funded, given the fact that when it is completed, the project is expected to require and therefore occupy over 6,000 hectares of land, in what is arguably one of the most expensive real estate projects in recent times.

Nobody’s quite sure yet, but as the project gets rolling the speculation too starts to mount specially given that the capital of the company is only a relatively paltry Rs 100 crore to start with.

The whispers are that one of India’s best known politicians is also, throwing his considerable financial muscle behind this huge project, but then nobody’s even willing to hint about that in public.

Cronies in Screaming

Tycoons in Mumbai and Delhi are complaining rather loudly, about the fact that the Prime Minister’s advisory council on trade and commerce, is once again packed with all the usual suspects. Besides the obvious fact that the age profile of those included tends to be too high, the real anxiety is that most of those included have had more than enough opportunity to have their say in a variety of fora over the last several years. While each of the individuals has sterling qualities and in most cases an impeccable track record of corporate governance and law-abidingness, the unfortunate fact is that, team Manmohan-Chidambaram-Montek, really require those who have the gumption to stand up and scream about the many bureaucratic hurdles that really prevent India Inc from getting ahead.

Though there are the usual set of screamers and whiners in this list, the anxiety that tomorrow’s tycoons have is that too many of them are either beneficiaries of the system that needs to be disbanded or have already exhausted themselves from screaming in the past.

Also, given that Commerce Minister Kamal Nath has just announced that his trade policy intends to push for a huge surge in manufactured exports, there are no real champions from that sector on the Prime Minister’s trade and commerce committee.

Perhaps it’s time that somebody somewhere put on their thinking caps and got together a bunch of people who are hurting today because they want to grow aggressively. Any volunteers?

dilipcherian@hotmail.com