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 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 License 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.
A trained engineer with an MBA, Soota worked in manufacturing during 20 years at the DCM Group, where he won a reputation as a turnaround specialist, before joining Wipro in 1984.
He has set the bar high for Mindtree, which received investor demand for 100 times the modest 50 million dollars it sought to raise in a share sale this year. Soota is targeting a five-fold jump in sales to one billion dollars by 2012.
THE LOST DECADES:
Such ambition would have been wishful-thinking during the four decades that India's economy lay in a socialist cocoon, expanding at an annual pace of 3.5 percent derisively referred to as the "Hindu rate of growth."
The public sector was put at the "commanding heights" of the economy by first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi, who ruled India for more than three decades after the British flag was lowered on August 15, 1947.
In promoting a "socialistic pattern of society," they shunned foreign investment and imports and discouraged production for export. Loss-making government companies, headed by bureaucrats and staffed by a workforce with a jobs-for-life culture, produced and sold everything from coal and steel to gas and electricity. Shortages were chronic.
Banks and insurance companies were nationalised in the 1960s and forced to fund the public sector. Getting a telephone-which might not work anyway-during one's lifetime without government patronage or paying a bribe was unthinkable.
Governments dictated what private companies should produce, how much and at what price they could sell under an elaborate licensing system that made for multiple layers of red tape and only promoted corruption. Such goods as automobiles, air-conditioners and televisions were deemed luxuries and their production discouraged.
Businessmen spent more time in the corridors of New Delhi's Udyog Bhavan or industry ministry seeking licenses than they did in corporate boardrooms.
"You would find the who's who of Indian business in Udyog Bhavan," said D.H. Pai Panandiker, economist at the private think tank RPG Foundation. "Now, no businessman will know where Udyog Bhavan is."
Empty treasury: Shock therapy was needed to trigger change and drive India's economy towards keeping the "tryst with destiny" Nehru predicted in his classic Independence Day speech.
Faced with a virtually empty treasury in 1991 and forced to sell gold reserves abroad to avoid defaulting on national debt, Manmohan Singh, then the new finance minister, bit the bullet.
An economist and unlikely politician, Singh ordered a double devaluation of the rupee to spur exports and hacked away at the License Raj. The doors were opened the doors to private competition, foreign investment and trade.
"The year 1991 marks the dividing line in the history of the Indian economy," said Pai Panandiker. "When you talk of the economy, it's in terms of pre-1991 and post-1991."
The Indian economy has grown at above eight percent in each of the past three years, with national output reaching one trillion dollars. Per capita income has doubled in 10 years.
Singh's government is sitting on 200 billion dollars of foreign reserves, compared with one billion dollars in May 1991 that wasn't then enough to pay for a fortnight of imports.
Indian businessmen are splurging billions of dollars to acquire firms abroad, from Ratan Tata's 13.7 billion for Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus Group to Vijay Mallya's 1.2 billion to snap up Scotch-whisky maker Whyte amp; Mackay.
Consumer Boom: India is now the fastest growing wireless market, adding six million mobile-phone users monthly to the 157 million it had as of March 31.
Automobile sales, which reached one million in 2003 after growing 68 percent in five years, will likely touch 20 million by 2030, making it the biggest car market after the US and China, according to the US consultancy Keystone.
Indian air carriers, which have 480 aircraft on order to be delivered by 2012, expect domestic traffic to double by 2010 to an annual 60 million passengers.
"India has just one caste today-the consumer caste," said G.R. Gopinath, 56, who founded the country's largest discount carrier Air Deccan in 2003.
"Policy is evolving bottom-up these days," said Gopinath, whose airline has already flown more passengers than state-owned Indian Airlines did in its first 50 years.
"India is seen now as a country of one billion hungry consumers, not as one billion hungry mouths to be fed," added Gopinath.
YOUTHFUL POPULATION:
India's consumer spending is set to quadruple to 1.5 trillion dollars by 2025, overtaking Germany at the number five spot, as a youthful population earns more and millions climb out of poverty, according to McKinsey Global Institute. Half of India's population hasn't joined the work force yet, and its population is now seen as an asset, not a burden.
India's rapid economic growth has resulted in a halving of the poverty rate in the past 20 years. And the number of deprived would be reduced by about half again, dropping to 22 percent by 2025, according to McKinsey.
The climb out of poverty "will rank alongside China's as one of the great achievements in economic history," it said.
But dire poverty remains a fact of daily life. "The gap between the top and the bottom has widened," conceded entrepreneur Soota. "That's because the bottom never rises in the same proportion as the top. "But there's so much optimism built in," he added. "There are so many opportunities."