India's economy on 'tryst with destiny' 60 years on
Monday, 13 August 2007
BANGALORE, India, Aug 12 (AFP): Ashok Soota, who founded software maker Mindtree Consulting in 1999, calls himself a "late-stage" entrepreneur, much as India is a late convert to free-market philosophy.
The entrepreneurial urge seized Soota when he was 57, an age when most people think of retiring, and after he spent 15 years building Wipro Infotech into a 500 million dollar company.
The soft-spoken businessman exemplifies the pent-up "entrepreneurial energy" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says was unleashed in 1991 when he freed private enterprise from the Licence Raj that shackled it for four decades after independence.
"We didn't have to send our software through government monopoly lines but could do so through our own digital communication links; to that extent the software industry benefited from reforms," said Soota, now 64.
"We escaped the tyranny of our (government-owned) infrastructure, which had held back the manufacturing sector," he said in an interview in Bangalore, the heart of a 50-billion-dollar information-technology industry that's leading India's economic charge.
The entrepreneurial urge seized Soota when he was 57, an age when most people think of retiring, and after he spent 15 years building Wipro Infotech into a 500 million dollar company.
The soft-spoken businessman exemplifies the pent-up "entrepreneurial energy" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says was unleashed in 1991 when he freed private enterprise from the Licence Raj that shackled it for four decades after independence.
"We didn't have to send our software through government monopoly lines but could do so through our own digital communication links; to that extent the software industry benefited from reforms," said Soota, now 64.
"We escaped the tyranny of our (government-owned) infrastructure, which had held back the manufacturing sector," he said in an interview in Bangalore, the heart of a 50-billion-dollar information-technology industry that's leading India's economic charge.