Movers and makers
Indian entrepreneurs are innovating even as they grow. Can they now take the great leap forward in manufacturing?
The germ of an idea that created India's largest safety shoes company was not born out of any PowerPoint presentations from suited-booted consultants. It was a mere challenge that a co-traveller on a Delhi-Gwalior train journey threw at Nitin Tiwari. "Can you produce this in India?" the person asked, pointing to his safety shoes, worn by workmen on shopfloors. That prompted Tiwari, 43, to explore a new arena and expand his father's leather business. Today, his firm, Acme Fabrik Plast Co, makes 8,000 pairs of safety shoes a day, has annual revenues of Rs 180 crore and counts companies such as Toyota, Honda, Dow Chemicals and BASF among its clients.
The economies of the developed world were built on the edifice of several small businesses over several decades. But nearly two years after the Narendra Modi government announced its Make in India push, the glass is still half full. As Nirmala Sitharaman, minister of state for commerce and industry, noted in her keynote address at the India Today Make in India Emerging Entrepreneur Awards, the government is taking steps to make doing business easier, removing infrastructure bottlenecks, providing last-minute connectivity and uninterrupted energy supply. She cited the instance of coal, where the country is now self-sufficient. "No thermal power plant needs to worry about coal supply," she said. She cleared the air on the Centre's objectives through the Make in India drive, stating it was not just export-oriented, but also aimed at the big market that is India.
NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, chief architect of the Make in India campaign, talked of the iconic lessons in entrepreneurship countries such as China, and even Singapore and Taiwan, have to offer. "Large enterprises destroy jobs while start-ups create them. India must become a country of disruptionists," he said. India must grow at 9-10 per cent and that can happen only when the manufacturing sector grows at 14 per cent, he added.
What is probably less visible in the entire Make in India drive, however, is the need to provide an intensive push at the grassroots level, creating a better ecosystem where the county's 3.6 crore micro, small and medium scale units, employing eight crore people, can move up the value chain. In his speech, Kalraj Mishra, Union minister for micro, small and medium enterprises, underlined the need to invest in small units. "Our goal is to make India a manufacturing hub. It can be possible only when there is investment in small enterprises," he said.
The government has taken a few big initiatives to pump prime manufacturing, but the country still has a long way to go, said Aroon Purie, Editor-in-Chief, India Today, as there are problems with land acquisition, labour laws, taxation reform and poor infrastructure. "But as the Make in India Emerging Entrepreneur award winners show, entrepreneurship is alive and well in India, often despite the government," he said.
Methodology
The objective of the awards was to identify and reward small yet successful Indian manufacturing companies that exemplify the spirit of Make in India. Ten sectors were considered-Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals, Food Processing, Automobiles, Textile and Garments, Defence and Aviation, Electronics Systems, Construction, Leather, Renewable Energy and Innovation.
Samagra, the social development and political consulting arm of Fourth Lion Technologies, worked as the knowledge partner for the India Today Group for this award. It leveraged four sources to identify relevant companies: analyst reports and databases, previous awards, targeted interviews and published information.
Based on this, the team first shortlisted more than 100 companies across the 10 sectors. Subsequently, it created a list of five success parameters to analyse each company:a) growth potential (production, revenues); b) employment generation (number of employees, job-oriented growth);c) brand image (testimonies, media news etc); d) contribution to industry (uniqueness, IP, process improvement);e) genesis & background (entrepreneur's struggle, story of the company). In the end, an eminent panel comprising Baba Kalyani, Chairman, Bharat Forge; Uday Kotak, VC & MD, Kotak Mahindra Bank; Manish Sabharwal, Co-founder & Chairman, TeamLease; and Aroon Purie, Editor-In-Chief, India Today, further scrutinised the list and selected the winners.
MAKE IN INDIA AWARDS
Fellow brickmakers sometimes visit his factory to see the machine that makes bricks. They then strike two bricks against each other and listen to the sound. "Then they hug me. The older generation believes that if two bricks produce the sound of steel, they are perfect," says Jhajjar-based Vilas Chhikara, 26, CEO of SNPC Machines. They make the world's only Mobile Brick Making machine in Firozpur Bangur village in Sonepat, a product that stood 19th among 30 innovations that bagged the DST-Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth Programme awards for 2016.
It took seven years of experimentation for Chhikara, his four brothers and three friends to get a prototype of the machine ready in 2014. The invention eliminates all intermediate steps in the brick-making process, cutting costs and time. Of their two designs, one can churn out 4,000-6,000 bricks per hour while the other can produce 10,000-12,000 and requires only three people to operate. In a traditional brick kiln, one worker generally makes 1,100 bricks in a day. "None of us is an engineer. It was sheer jugaad," says Chhikara. An MBA from Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar, he hopes things will change under the government's aggressive Make in India policy. Tax and excise to the tune of Rs 4.2-7 lakh add hugely to the cost of the machine that sells at Rs 34.9 lakh.
-Sukant Deepak
As a child, walking to Jamnabai Narsee School at Juhu airport, Bharat Malkani would see the planes flying overhead and dream of building a military fighter plane one day. Having studied electronics at Manipal University and technology management at Washington University, Malkani, 50, returned to India in 1989. In 1991, he visited the air trade show in Dubai and came back determined to start his own aviation company. With Rs 5 lakh in hand and an 80 sq ft rented space in Vile-Parle, he started a company. It got approval from DGCA for maintenance of planes in 1995. He also began production of black boxes. Earlier, the government relied on the US and Israel for modification of planes. Today Max Aerospace is the only private Indian company that integrates weapons in aircraft. Malkani supplies military equipment to HAL, IAF and the navy, and civil aviation equipment to Lufthansa, Air France and other airlines. He has modified a hundred-odd planes to date. The childhood dream had taken wing.
-Kiran Tare
When Satya Vadlamani, 51, left a cushy job at Ajanta Pharma in 1997 to set up a trading company for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), she wanted to spend more time with her family. But her firm, called Murli Krishna Exports then, kept her busier than before. In 2004, the electrical and electronics engineer teamed up with analytical chemistry expert Vijay Shastri, to manufacture pellets, the process of coating a drug to enhance its effectiveness and reduce side-effects. The company used water instead of the older solvent-based technology, making the pellets safer for consumption. It wasn't easy. Family pressures apart, setting up a plant back then was difficult. "It's easy to take shortcuts,"she says, "but it wasn't what I wanted." Today, the company has 128 employees on its rolls and 60 on contract. Its plant at Ranjangaon near Pune complies with good manufacturing practices as per WHO and EU guidelines. The company earned Rs 42 crore in revenues in 2015-16 and supplies to 64 firms in 18 countries.
-MG Arun
While at the Dhaulpur military school, Nitin Tiwari, originally from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh, never imagined he would end up working in his father's company. Business was not on his mind when he started working with a computer company in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. He does not remember the name of the fellow commuter on a train journey from Delhi to Gwalior 13 years ago but is eternally grateful to him for changing the course of his life and making a successful entrepreneur out of a computer engineer.
They had got talking and the man asked him what his future plans were. When Tiwari said he wasn't sure, his co-passenger asked him: "Can you produce these in India?", pointing to the safety shoes he was wearing. Their soles and toes reinforced, safety shoes are essential footwear for those working in any industrial environment.
"The person took off his shoes and gave them to me," Tiwari says. "I started from there." Safety standards in India were in an abysmal state in 1994, and Tiwari took up the challenge to bring them on par with international standards. He spent the next seven years fulfilling family responsibilities. "My business took off after I got married in 2000," he says.
He bought a shoe-making machine from China the next year. It took him another four years to set up his first manufacturing plant at Gwalior in 2005. Today, he runs seven plants-in Gwalior, Kanpur and Bhiwandi near Mumbai. Producing more than 8,000 pairs a day, Acme is India's largest safety shoe producer today, and has been clocking 25 per cent growth every year since 2012, claims Tiwari.
-Kiran Tare
A study of companies such as Ford Motors and Pepsi while doing his MBA prompted Viral Desai, 38, to set up Zenitex, a textile process and dyeing company, in 2003. Over the years, this enterprise has become a model venture in the textile industry for using sustainable practices and has won the Best Industry of Gujarat and National Energy Conservation award for three consecutive years.
Growing up in a family that ran a silk textile business, Desai, an alumnus of the Metas Adventist College in Surat, saw close at hand the wastage in the textile industry and "the dark side of the production units". With Zenitex, he introduced sustainable initiatives such as using renewable energy and reducing consumption.
Water consumption is a key concern for the industry. "Being a water-based industry, scarcity has always been an issue. This led us to think of ways to save water," says Desai, who holds a certification from the Limca Book of Records for winning the most number of awards in the field of energy conservation. "Once we started saving water, we felt the benefits of savings in terms of energy." It worked well for his balance sheet as well.
Zenitex also has variable frequency drives and inverters on all machines and utilities in the process plant; the unit is run using power generated by windmills. This year, Zenitex installed an auto coal-feeding system in their boiler for better combustion. The factory unit in Surat has a green cover of over 5,000 trees and plants with drip irrigation facilities. "We follow the belief that if you take care of nature, it has its own unique way of giving back in abundance," says Desai.
-Aditi Pai
When Russian-made electronic timers installed on missiles failed unexpectedly in the 1999 Kargil war, it was Bengaluru-based Electronic Automation Pvt Ltd (EAPL) the Indian Army turned to for procuring timers. Madhav Kamat, 75, founded EAPL with his friend way back in 1984. "Those were the days when nothing worked in favour of the manufacturing sector," he recalls. "I started this company with our first product-electronic timers, which until then were being imported. But for everything, we had to go to New Delhi, and approvals were hard to come by." Today, EAPL manufactures a wide range of products, including tachometers, monitoring devices and digital counters. "Our first product (electronic timers) continues to be our flagship product, having sold over 2 million units to diverse industries," says Kamat. EAPL's electronic timers command a 30 per cent market share in the segment in India. EAPL has a turnover ofRs 16 crore and a workforce of about 130 employees in two plants. The company has achieved 60 per cent localisation; critical components are imported from Taiwan, South Korea, China and Singapore. According to Kamat, this is the right time for entrepreneurs to plunge into manufacturing. "Today, there are plenty of factors working in favour of budding entrepreneurs. Competition will make us better and strengthen the manufacturing ecosystem."
-Aravind Gowda
After a master's in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1964, Sitaram Shah worked in the UK for three years, but returned to India to launch Sipra Engineers in Mumbai, which produces die casters for the automobile industry in 1968. A relative helped him get his first major client in Bajaj Auto Limited. After a decade, Shah took his plant to Nashik. His association with Bajaj came to an end and he struggled for a while. He then took to exporting the readymade die. It worked. Son Vandan, a graduate in industrial engineering, took the Nashik plant to the next level as its MD. Today, the company's turnover is close to Rs 150 crore.
-Kiran Tare
In 2001, when Macons started manufacturing the mobile concrete batching plant of 12m3 to 30m3 per hour, it became the first Indian manufacturer to do so. The equipment was built in technical collaboration with Danish company Intercon. "At that time, India did not have this technology. I wanted to bring innovative products to India and expose our customers to products from Europe," says Dharmesh Surelia, 46, who founded Macons in 2000 with his first facility in Vatva. A mechanical engineer from SSVPS, Dhule, he joined the family business of construction equipment manufacture in 1990. By 1995, he had started designing his own products based on the gaps he saw in the existing equipment. His first design was a soil compactor. In 2000, he started Macons and began making stationary/mobile concrete batching plants, leveraging his decade-long experience in the manufacturing industry.
Another major achievement in the founding year was the kerbing machine, which was "the first such indigenously designed; and developed machine". The machine is a much-needed product in road building for laying dividers and drain lines. "These machines proved ideal for successful operations at various NHAI projects all over India," says Surelia. By 2005, Macons had started exporting its first batch of products to Germany. Sixteen years into its existence, Macons designs and produces 15 types of equipment with over 100 models of various products. The company, which now has two more facilities in Changodar and Matoda, has sold around 3,000 products to over 1,000 clients across the country with a capacity to produce 250 big machines in a year. With a growth rate of around 80 per cent this year, Macons expects to touch the Rs 100 crore turnover mark in 2016-17.
-Aditi Pai
Born to conservative Christians in Nagercoil, Patricia Narayan bid her family goodbye the day she got herself a Tamil Brahmin husband. But when he turned out to be a wastrel and barely able to hold on to their catering business, she decided to take back her life. "I realised my passion for food would have to double up as my livelihood," she says. She took a professional course in commercial cooking and set up her first kiosk on Marina beach. Soon she bagged catering contracts for the Slum Clearance Board and the National Institute of Port Management. When, in 2006, she lost her spirit and her newly married daughter Sangeetha in a car crash, her son Praveen quit his job in the merchant navy and helped her set up the first unit of the restaurant chain that came to be called Sandeepha. This was in 2010. Sandeepha now has four branches in Chennai. "I'm my own psychiatrist," says Patricia. "When I'm depressed, I read my own story."
-Saranya Chakrapani
A serial entrepreneur once employed by Microsoft, Needham saw opportunity in the dusty bylanes of India's small towns from his cosy office in North America. "The situation was complicated: one, there was no or partial access to power; two, there were people who could not make upfront payment for solar installations," he says. He co-founded a company, along with two microfinance experts, Jacob Winiecki and Michael MacHarg, to give small solar house systems on a pay-as-you-go model in India. They manufactured a unique electricity meter that allowed people to recharge, track and control supply. They could buy energy for Rs 10-20 a day. For Rs 20, they got a fan, three light points and a mobile charger. Today, 20,000 homes use Simpa's solar installations, with nearly 30 per cent of these homes in areas not connected to a power grid.
-Anilesh S Mahajan