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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 07/06
India's New Entrepreneurial Classes: The High Growth Economy and Why it is Sustainable?
Sunil Bharti Mittal
CASI Working Paper
February 2006
Abstract
Introduction by Dr. Francine R. Frankel
(Director, Center for the Advanced Study of India)
I am Francine Frankel, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, and it is my great pleasure this evening to introduce our speaker for CASI’s Annual Lecture, Sunil Bharti Mittal, the founder, chairman, and group managing director, Bharti Enterprises. I hardly need tell this audience that Bharti Tele-Ventures is India’s leading telecom conglomerate and its largest mobile service operator.
In many ways, Sunil Mittal represents the kind of success story we have often associated with the American dream, only now it has become the Indian dream. A graduate of Punjab University, he started Bharti in 1976 at the age of eighteen, and almost thirty years later, under his leadership Bharti has played a pioneering role in transforming India’s telecom sector, using leading edge technologies to become one of the top ten enterprises in India, with a market capitalization of over $14 billion. His most recent partnership with Vodafone, the world’s leading mobile telecommunications company, represents the largest single foreign investment in post-independence India. It positions Bharti to gain global leadership in the telecom sector. Sunil is the personification of his own topic for tonight’s talk, India’s new entrepreneurial classes, the high growth economy, and why it is sustainable. Mr. Sunil Mittal.
(Applause.)
