BS People: Dilip Modi

Chamber music

The newly-elected president of industry body Assocham, Dilip Modi, is an ardent champion of how mobile phones are going to change the everyday lives of Indians. It won’t be just a device on which to play games or listen to music. Going forward, it will become a platform, Modi believes, for value-added services like e-commerce, paying utility bills and taking math or English lessons from an online tutor.

It’s not surprising that Modi, who is also the managing director of Spice Mobility, is so upbeat. The market for mobile value-added services (VAS) is likely to grow to $5 billion in five years from $1 billion today, he estimates. His firm is already gearing up to tap into this digital ecosystem by building a range of such services to deliver healthcare, education and entertainment over a handheld device.

‘‘We are evolving from an infrastructure provider to a services provider,’’ says 36-year-old Modi, Assocham’s youngest president. After studying at Scindia School, Gwalior, and Delhi Public School in the Capital’s R K Puram, Modi studied science at the UK’s Brunel University, before obtaining an MBA from Imperial College, London, specialising in finance.

When Modi joined the family business back in 1995, he seeded and steered the group’s telecom venture. In 1998, Modi Telstra became the first company to launch mobile telecom services in India, a business it later sold to Idea Cellular as the industry went through a phase of consolidation. Since then, the Rs 2,300-crore Spice Mobility has focused on three businesses — devices, retail and VAS.

Modi is keen to use his Assocham tenure to create a viable policy framework for the VAS industry, get it industry status and enable Indian VAS firms to access venture capital funding. Spice Mobility will partner with Assocham to sponsor a study on how such an enabling framework for mobile VAS and a digital ecosystem can be created.

Modi’s broader challenge will be to make Assocham relevant. “The problem with chambers is that they think of themselves as policy advocates, rather than think tanks. There’s a lot of thought among members. Chambers that evolve into think tanks will be more relevant,” says Modi.