India’s New Capitalists:Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation

With the world’s economic order getting restructured, the buzz word today is ‘emerging economies’. The transformation and growth of these economies has been attributed to emergence and influence of entrepreneurial private and collective firms (Peng and Heath, 1996). A growing body of research attempts to understand the sociocultural, political and economic factors in these countries that facilitate or impede entrepreneurship. While studies have examined several transition economies, such as some East-European countries as well as China, there is a glaring paucity of rigorous research on the evolution of the business environment in India. The pattern of entrepreneurship development in India is vastly different from countries like China and constituents of the erstwhile Soviet Union. Despite the presence of ‘impediments’ such as ideological practices and societal norms that stifle entrepreneurial zeal, protectionist policies, red-tape and bureaucracy, business and innovation have thrived for centuries in India. It is said that the choices we have made in the past, limit the outcomes of the present; therefore in order to understand our present, it is vital to understand our history. As the world beats a path to India on account of its growing economic vigor, it becomes increasingly pertinent to understand the evolution of our business arena.