Business discontinuity

Her life has tracked the story of India's most respected contemporary enterprise, Infosys Technologies. Born a year before her father founded Infosys with six of his friends, Akshata Murty, 29, is stitching a story all of her own. The first-born of Murthy and half-inheritor of his wealth, Murty's (she spells her name after her mother Sudha) vision for her life is polarly different from her father's business.

Akshata is, instead, building an eponymous woman's fashion label focussed on preserving eastern art forms. A B-school graduate from Stanford, she cut her teeth at Deloitte and Unilever, and worked with a cleantech focussed Silicon Valley venture capital fund before her current avatar.

She's under no illusions that being the daughter of Murthy, Indian IT's most-recognisable face, will help her venture. But comparisons with Daddy Dear are inevitable. The expectation among friends and family "is that I will create a billion-dollar fashion label within the next few years", she says.

Akshata's flight into a new world is finding a parallel elsewhere, some 2,000 km north, in Delhi. Roshni Nadar, the only daughter of Shiv Nadar, Chairman of the HCL Group , has been inducted into a holding company, but she's clear that social enterprise was where she wanted to head. So, education is where she will spend at least five years. For someone who can walk into a $5-billion business, wealth creation is last on the heiress' mind: "Money-making and education do not go together," she beamed, in a conversation with Business Today last year.

At Infosys' cross-town rival, Wipro, another heir is taking baby steps. Rishad Premji, 33, widely speculated to succeed father and Chairman Azim Premji, has been working up the ranks for the past two years—starting with the financial services team to the current General Manager in Investor Relations and Treasury Practice— after stints at GE and consultancy firm Bain & Company.

A Harvard Business School 2005 alum, Rishad has been front-ending acquisitions and playing a pivotal role in growing IT service revenues and is keen to drive Wipro's expansion into new categories such as clean energy. A change of guard may be sooner than later at Wipro, no matter how reticent the company may be about it. (Wipro declined an interview with Rishad and a photo request.)

The story is somewhat different at Mumbai's Patni Computer, India's oldest tech services firm. The 32-yearold son of Chairman Narendra Patni, Anirudh, the only contender to the top slot, left earlier this year as differences cropped up with the management headed by a new CEO Jeya Kumar. The sons of Co-founder Gajendra Patni—Amit Patni and Arihant Patni—had already opted for a career outside the family business in areas like legal outsourcing and infrastructure projects. The scions declined to participate in this story.

For India's most successful sunrise industry, clearly, there isn't really a model succession experience.

— Additional reporting by Anand Adhikari