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Munjal nominated for World Entrepreneur of The Year award

BS Bureau

Indian entreneurship is set to arrive globally with Ernst & Young nominating Brijmohan Lall Munjal along with 22 last year's winners from other nations for the World Entrepreneur Of The Year selections at Monte Carlo this June.

Of these as many as three will be Indians. Last year two brothers of Indian origin, Vijay and Bhikhu Patel, were selected joint winners for the UK's Entrepreneur of the Year award.

So at Monte Carlo this year (the second such global selection) there will be 23 entrepreneurs representing 22 countries.

Announcing this in Bangalore on Wednesday, K N Memani, chairman of Ernst and Young in India, also threw open the nominations for this year's Entrepreneur Of The Year selections which will be held in Bangalore in October.

That perhaps had to happen. In the last three years a majority of entrepreneurs in the reckoning have been from the south!

Brijmohan Lall, the patriarch of the Munjal clan and chairman of Hero Honda, the largest two-wheeler company in the world, was crowned Entreprenur Of The Year last year at the third annual selections organised in Mumbai.

This year's selections for the awards, fourth since they commenced in 1999, will be done by a group of jurors led by the doughty old corporate warrior Rahul Bajaj who will be assisted by Janki Ballabh (SBI), Sunil Mittal (Bharati), Rakesh Mohan (Union finance ministry), Omkar Goswami (CII) and N Sankar (Sanmar group).

A galaxy of winners from Indian business have been honoured with this award over the last three years.

They range from a veritable youngster like Ekta Kapoor to the venerable Brijmohan Lall, from a new economy icon like Azim Premji to a brick and mortar stalwart like J J Irani, and from Suresh Krishna in the south to Yogi Deveshwar in the east.

The awards celebrate the guts, grit and capacity to take risks that mark out an entrepreneur, explained Memani, adding that managing risk is as important as taking risk; which is why the awards are also a salute to those who create wealth.

Explaining the role of Ernst & Young, V V Ranganathan, national director for the awards programme in India, said "we don't select, we organise".

He then went on to trace the hoary history of the term entrepreneur, which in the nineteenth century described artistes who thrived on their imagination.

The awards carry no cash prize but seek to do more, make national idols and role models of the winners and give them a great chance to network and spread their message.

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