Redhotcurry Review - Rating: (3 flames)
Reviewed by Lopa Patel, 16 April 2010

Smarana Mitra's book 'Vision India 2020' is an orgasm of entrepreneurial zeal in which she takes 45 successfully established business models, adds a dash of marketing masala, and relaunches them in a 'futuristic retrospective' India circa 2020. Admittedly, Mitra who has successfully started three US-based businesses and written several books, including the 'Entrepreneur Journeys' trilogy, begins with a good grounding in research. Armed with a degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she knows "of what she speaks" when writing about disruptive technologies, rollout of digital communications and the critical success factors to turn startups into global players. In America she has the business models of Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and others to draw upon and in India she has the promise of hard work, enthusiasm and the sheer 1.2 billion population size from which to start.

Mitra firmly believes that ten years from now "India stands to be the world leader in everything from technology innovation to state-of-art railways, solar energy to film animation" and that her book is a clarion call to "visionary entrepreneurs everywhere who are daring enough to turn ideas into billion-dollar enterprises". And therein lies my first problem with this book.

In Mitra's utopian nirvana, business models like Grameen Bank's micro-finance initiatives and micro franchising, that have longed struggled to achieve scale, become billion-dollar businesses. She takes arts and crafts, effectively cottage industries, and turns them into billion dollar businesses. She imports wine and Argentine tango (the dance) and rolls out a billion-dollar lifestyle business. Clearly this is all rubbish. I struggled to think of one such business locally, let alone globally. Indian social venture enterprises like the Ela Bhatt's hugely successful 'Sewa' initiative (not mentioned in this book) remain social ventures or not-for-profit - this is the core of this model. So I would argue that many such models would suffer when turned into commercial ventures, let alone billion dollar commercial ventures.

The second problem with Mitra's strategy is she fails to take into account business competitors. The chapter in which she sets-up 'Taxonomy' and takes on Mike Lynch's 'Autonomy' is an example. Taxonomy is India's flagship software product company that tackles the identified problem of 'unstructured data management'. "Open source allowed us to be a more marketing-orientated business than a sales-oriented business", she claims - a feature that allowed them to compete head-on with Autonomy. "Often, our customers would not only buy our products but also a development team from us which created a tremendous exit barrier that Autonomy could not compete with". Which is all very interesting, but untrue. Open Source is often used for portability of data between applications, databases and suppliers - it is not used because it is free or low cost. And what of Open Standards in data management? Mitra also fails to speculate on how Autonomy, which had sales in excess $500 million in 2008, might retaliate to this assault on its business model from open source technology that has been around for decades.

After five of six chapters of this book, one begins to notice classic Mitraisms: she merely has to pick up her address book to find mentors, investors and VCs all willing to relocate to India to set-up her fictional businesses; she writes a blog and a million CVs flood in; she sweet-talks officials and is able to acquire large chunks of India's prime real estate and in several chapters she is able to begin a mass slum clearance from the hellhole that is Dharavi (Mumbai's biggest slum) to rural idylls where the under-privileged earn income from flower-growing, mango orchards, creameries, craftsmanship and running franchised book-keeping businesses! In a retro 1960s-style flashback, Mitra has been able to achieve what had eluded India's politicians for generations.

Her skills do not stop there: she tackles large-scale infrastructure projects like railroads (Lighting Rails), waterways (Eastgate), roads (Magic Carpet Rides), shipping (Himalaya Shipping), water treatment (Gangotri), solar power (Adishakti) and housing projects (Green Village). She tackles medical care issues (Maya Ray), education (Lucid), semiconductors (Nucleon), travel services (Renaissance), film animation (Elixar), sports TV (NCTV) among other hi-tech business models like software and search. The sheer range of business models is exhausting to even think about and the ideas a little polarised given that Mitra fails to factor in 'human nature' into her equations.

But 'Vision India 2020' is just that, a vision. I admire Sramana Mitra for sketching out the details of her visions and while I might criticise the liberties she takes with the financial accounting in her fictional businesses, I do applaud her for the boldness of her plans. In the introduction she writes, "in my model of development, it is the entrepreneurs who wield the most potent weapons of mass reconstruction. To build markets: to build nations; to build worlds". And for that reason alone 'Vision India' is a must read for anyone who wants to envisage one way in which India may be reinvented as a true global super power by 2020.

About the Author

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a weekly column for Forbes and the business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy (www.sramanamitra.com). She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available on Amazon.com.