The new global Indians

Down history, Indian traders and merchants have never cared much for mountain ranges and vast oceans when it came to travelling in search of profits, and have been "global" centuries before the term became fashionable. That these traders did not leave behind monuments to their achievements is probably because Indians, unlike Europeans, rarely mixed up trade with political or territorial conquests. So Indian schoolchildren are familiar with names such as Columbus but cannot list the traders of Gujarat or the Deccan who made the most of their position on the East-West trade routes towards the start of the second millennium.

Ever since the liberalisation of 1991, and especially over the past decade, many big Indian groups have made big-ticket acquisitions abroad in diverse sectors, showing the world that India is not just about cheap labour but also about good managers and great ideas. So we had a Tata Tea and Tetley, and a Tata Motors and Jaguar Land Rover. Liberalisation only helped them grow from their base in India, and buttress the point made much earlier by the likes of Aditya Birla and Lakshmi Mittal, who left behind India's licence-permit shackles to set up empires in geographies ranging from Southeast Asia to the Indies.

But a new generation of Indian businessmen and traders is emerging. These people are making their millions from the unlikeliest of businesses (lacking the cost edge synonymous with India) to the commonest of products (honey for the European's breakfast table or roses for the Japanese lover).

BT's reporters, who come across scores of such success stories in their daily commute through the crush of Indian business, decided to tell some of the remarkable ones. "Some" is the key word here: we apologise to the thousands that we are sure to have missed or not written about.

With this, we bring to an end the Gen Next series that we started last year, and which has covered India's entrepreneurial middle rung (BT, October 4, 2009), the new inheritors of big business families (BT, March 7, 2010) and the hottest start-ups (BT, June 27, 2010). But there is no ending the possibilities that are open to enterprising souls.