India has no NBA-class arena, laments Vivek Ranadive.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: It’s meant to be a commentary piece on expanding Indo-US business ties, and the exciting outreach by the governments of both countries to achieve it, but Vivek Ranadive, chairman and owner of the Sacramento Kings and founder of TIBCO Software, Inc., writing in Fortune, also gives an insight into the hurdles that international companies face in setting up a business in India.
Of late, Ranadive has aggressively gone about trying to insource fans from India to the Kings, by promoting basketball in India. He has instilled the belief in top NBA circles that the future of the sport, its expansion, rests in millions of people taking to the sport in India.
In doing so, Ranadive has also thrust himself of late as a leading voice of Indian American entrepreneurs, with high profile public appearances at the India Day parade last August in New York City, and then at the Madison Square Garden, with his daughter, Anjali World – who sang the US national anthem, when the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi gave his public speech.
Indian government officials and top industry leaders now recognize Ranadive as indispensable, along with PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, to put across the message of increasing business ties between the two countries.
It was no wonder then that Ranadivé was part of the business delegation which accompanied president Barack Obama to India, to attend the Republic Day celebrations in January.
Ranadive wrote a commentary piece on that trip in Fortune, ‘My trip to India with Obama’. The man who came to Boston with $50 in his pocket from Bombay, analyzes: “There will be a shift in India to a postcolonial, post-socialist country strongly aligned with the United States.”
However, in the piece, Ranadive has also given an insight into what transpires behind closed doors, some of the decades-old, perennial issues like red tape and stifling, overarching bureaucracy that stymie businesses when they try to set up shop in India.
Ranadive writes: “Sorenson wanted to open hotels, and he explained how it took at least 106 permits in India and just six in Singapore. Roderick had spent six months in India trying to build nuclear reactors and provide employment to tens of thousands. Iger talked about how pirated movies were robbing both local and overseas content creators of large revenue streams.”
Sorenson is Marriott International CEO and President Arne Sorenson; Roderick is Westinghouse Electric CEO Daniel Roderick, and Iger is Robert Allen ‘Bob’ Iger, chairman and chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company.
Ranadive also points out that while working on a paper on how best to increase trade between India and the US from $100 billion a year to $500 billion a year over the next decade, he noted several shortcomings in India from the technology and infrastructure point of view: “While it is great to have brilliant software engineers in India, if it takes hours to commute and they have limited Internet access, then productivity is severely limited.”
And while “infrastructure, refrigerated food supply chains and consistent regulations that adhere to global standards” were the core issues in the working paper developed by the American entrepreneurs, guided by Honeywell’s CEO Dave Cote – read as some of India’s weakest links to growth – Ranadive also makes it amply clear that he is disillusioned by the lack of facilities for basketball too, and perhaps realizes it’s going to be an uphill task to achieve his dream of putting the Kings firmly in the conscience of Indian sport.
“Wearing my Sacramento Kings hat, I lamented the fact that India currently does not have an NBA-class arena to serve as a galvanizing force and civic space in the community. Indeed, Prime Minister Modi has a dream of creating smart cities, and arenas should be central to that project. This is not a new idea – after all, cities have been built around coliseums for thousands of years,” writes Ranadive.
And perhaps, just perhaps, there was a Bobby Jindalesque-kind of nose thumbing by Ranadive, when he concludes: “As the trip ended, I reflected on how proud I am to be an American. Our business leaders are the finest in the world.”
Of course, to be fair, Ranadive does add that “India will become one of America’s most important partners in the 21st century and finally achieve its full potential.”
However, the devil is in the details; the acute shortcomings that Ranadive has put forth on India, exposed how India’s promise of making it easy to do business, is still far from the truth.
Read Ranadive’s full commentary on Fortune at this link:
https://fortune.com/2015/02/27/sacramento-kings-chairman-vivek-ranadive-my-trip-to-india-with-obama/
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Bazaar)