India’s time has come, and the ongoing decade could give India its best consumer story, said jury members of the India Business Leaders Award (IBLA) on Tuesday, October 31 during a panel discussion. The jury members included Manny Maceda, CEO, Bain & Company, Chair, IBLA, Standard Chartered Bank's Zarin Daruwala, Mahindra Group's Anish Shah, Federal Bank's Shyam Srinivasan, Hindustan Unilever’s Rohit Jawa, CaratLane's Mithun Sacheti, Olympic Champion Abhinav Bindra, Meta India's Sandhya Devanathan and Zerodha's Nikhil Kamath.

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“The hunger to have a better quality of life is the best consumer story of the decade,' said Jawa, managing director and chief executive officer, Hindustan Unilever.

“If you look back five years, the middle class and above have doubled; we expect that to double again. They consume at a much higher factor of consumption, one or two times. So, we will see a huge amount of breakthrough and consumption,” Jawa added.

Anish Shah, MD and CEO, Mahindra Group believes India is much more than a consumption story, and the country is taking leadership in the world today.

“The key area we're seeing is one with regard to combating climate change, that's creating a host of opportunities in India. The solar challenge, or the renewables challenge that has been put out by the Prime Minister, is one that is enabling us to grow our solar business multi-fold, and you're going to see that across multiple industries that will contribute to renewables.”

Zerodha co-founder and chief financial officer (CFO) Nikhil Kamath noted that India is slowing comparatively lower than the rest of the world. He also lauded the current government for selling the India story well to the world.

“I think everything is relative from a global lens; they look at India in a very sanguine manner in comparison to how much they are slowing. So we might be slowing a little bit in the last couple of quarters, but I don't think we are doing as badly as the rest of the world. For many reasons that hold true to a large extent, I think the way the India story has been sold to the world by the incumbent government and the narrative that has been set has really helped India. So I think, kudos to them for having created that over the last decade.”

Mahindra Group’s Shah also pointed at Indian companies, including his own, competing with the best in the world.

“Indian companies are making world-class products, and are beating global leaders in India. I think we have multiple Indian companies, not just Mahindra, making products today that can stand up to anyone in the world and be able to go there. So to me, that is a very significant change from what we have seen in the past."

Highlighting Mahindra Group’s efforts in this regard, Shah added, “Mahindra tractors is number one globally in terms of volume. And in multiple markets around the world, we are starting to gain significant share and starting to get into the top five and top three. As we are looking at automobiles, our SUVs today are now being taken to a few key markets globally. We aim to get to a 15 to 20% market share in those markets, which is not insignificant.”

India is seeing similar trends that other markets have witnessed in the last one or two decades, HUL’s Jawa added.

“I have some experience seeing other markets in the last 10–20 years that have gone from a few $1,000 per capita to middle income, and so on and so forth. I think I can already see those trends. In fact, some are even faster… So I think the hard infrastructure is getting better, so I think we might even see a much faster trajectory going forward, because the stage is set.”

(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)