Three city-based entrepreneurs rejected a perception on Wednesday — that Bengal lacks business acumen.
“I think this whole notion of different traits of any community is a figment of imagination. I don’t think we should think about it. There are going to be real challenges — finding customers, dealing with competitors, finding financing. Let us focus on them,” said Rudra Chatterjee, the managing director of Luxmi Group and the chairman of Obeetee.
Chatterjee, Peerless managing director Jayanta Roy, lawyer and managing partner of AQUILAW Sucharita Basu, and banking and wealth management professional Anindya Paulchaudhuri were part of a panel at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, in association with Victoria Memorial Hall and The Telegraph.
Paulchaudhuri, the moderator, brought up an often-asked question.
“Do you think that we Bengalis can still be leaders of businesses and we can turn the tide back from where we are now, known as a laid back, 9-to-5 job-centric people,” he asked, prompting Chatterjee’s assertion.
More important than dwelling in an imaginary world was to identify an opportunity, Chatterjee said.
“Firstly, we have to recognise where we are. We are in a dense consumption market. There are almost 100 million consumers. Whether you want to sell tea or legal services or financial services, if you can attract the consumption in a few hundred kilometres, you have a lot of people who are increasing in purchasing power. You can target them,” he said.
He linked the perception problem to Bengal’s colonial past.
“Nobody says Mumbai does not have business acumen. There were several Swadesi businesses in Kolkata but many of the old businesses were British owned. Tea, jute, indigo, managing agencies, all these were run and influenced by the British. The banks were British. We were in a very European export-oriented ecosystem. The businesses went away.”
What was then Bombay, in contrast, had thriving cotton and textile industries.
“Bombay attracted home-grown consumption. Kolkata had the Imperial Bank, Bombay had the stock market, getting local capital for getting railways to bring cotton. After that, there were many aspects — the Partition, the Communist rule. There are many people who understand these things better than I do. But we have to understand the historical context. Not get weighed down by it but understand,” said Chatterjee.
“We should just throw away the figments of imagination of one community as incompetent. Not only about Bengalis but any other community,” he said.
Basu said she had noticed a change in her clients in Bengal.
“In the past few years, I have been noticing that Bengali entrepreneurs have been thinking much more aggressively than they did before. There are companies, my clients, which have taken funds, taken private equity, they have grown with the fund, they have had strategic advisors on board. All these elements are very very important in the corporate journey of any organisation. So, it (Bengalis lack business acumen) is just a perception. I am sure we are looking at an exciting decade,” she said.
Roy gave his company’s example.
“We have treated entrepreneurship like engineering, continuously reinventing ourselves with policy decisions and moving ahead. Things are changing very fast. The colonial hangover has taken some time to go away. The pace of change will accelerate in this decade,” he said.
