The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : ‘Development in China is top down’

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Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
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‘Development in China is top down’

Staff Reporter

A book that unfurls the story of entrepreneurs in India and China

Bangalore: India and China, the predicted giants in the global economy, find themselves interlinked and differentiated on various levels in Tarun Khanna’s Billions of Entrepreneurs – How India and China are Reshaping their Futures – and Yours.

The book catalogues and analyses entrepreneurial activity that has taken place in 10 to 15 years, citing examples from rural and urban societies in the two countries.

Here for a panel discussion with Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairperson and Managing Director of Biocon Ltd., and Rama Bijapurkar, Market Strategist, Consumer Issues, Mr. Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, spoke to The Hindu about his book.

“The book is largely an accumulation of personal stories of people I worked with and ran into in both India and China,” he said. Not looking to write a book, he decided that all the material he had accumulated needed to be put together, and that was how Billions of Entrepreneurs came about. Various references to Bangalore in the book were a result of its newfound status of the city as the IT (information technology) capital and he describes Bangalore as “a new ecosystem”, with “an accidental agglomeration of circumstances”.

Much of the book reiterated that development in China was top down with the State initiating it, while in India a more bottom-up model had crystallised, wherein the initiative came from the grassroots. “I have offered a critique of governments where it was required,” he said. His target is the average, educated reader and his book is an attempt in the direction of “accessible scholarship”.

Billions of Entrepreneurs is slated to be translated into six to 10 Indian languages.

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