It started on the flight from New Delhi to Hyderabad. On the next seat was a bubbly business school graduate and a Hyderabad insider wanting to chat away through the two-hour journey. Her tips on how to make the best of a short trip to the Charminar city ranged from the best neighbourhood biryani to the people who matter in the newest state in India — Telangana. Ivanka Trump’s visit to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit found mention too, but that was more in reference to the guiding spirit of the start-up culture in Hyderabad: T-Hub. And also to drive home the fact that Hitec City, location for the Ivanka summit on the outskirts of Hyderabad, was now the new “downtown” with all the buzz from skyscraper multinational offices, glitzy malls and rich apartments.
The co-passenger, now running an NGO focused on sustainable development, mentioned three names who were at the centre of things in Hyderabad. Information Technology minister K T Rama Rao or KTR as he’s popularly known; Industries, Commerce and IT principal secretary Jayesh Ranjan; and T-Hub chief executive Jay Krishnan.
The remarkable thing about these names was that they cropped up again and again in different conversations with different people across Telangana government and businesses. They are people who are young, accessible and easy to communicate with, according to an executive with an MNC. A state government official remarked that Jayesh Ranjan is like Amitabh Kant (Niti Aayog CEO) of the Telangana government.
Ranjan, a 1992-batch IAS with a Business Management degree from IIM Calcutta and Masters in Public Management from Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, seems to be the go-to man for any company from Microsoft to Google, Walmart to Amazon to Ikea. A visit to his second floor office at the Telangana Secretariat shows that he makes time for anybody who wishes to see him. Rows of chairs, lined up in a classroom-like setting, are mostly filled, and the unwritten rule here is that you shift to the last row once you’ve had your say. There’s no time to exchange pleasantries, the idea is to just start talking while Ranjan listens and replies in between multiple official calls usually on speaker phone mode. Decisions are made in a jiffy too. For example, ahead of the Ivanka summit, an NGO brought a sample of an artwork that local artisans had made, and Ranjan immediately said it could be one of the gifts to the visiting US delegation.
Jay Krishnan, another mover in the Hyderabad circles, occupies a non-descript corner room on the first floor of five-storeyed T-Hub — the largest start-up incubator in India. The IIM Bangalore graduate has been a serial entrepreneur, mostly in the US, and is now looking at turning Hyderabad into a top global start-up destination. The building is swarmed with entrepreneurs in health to energy, agriculture to transport and venture capitalists are coming in too from across the world. It adds to the value of T-Hub that Ratan Tata had inaugurated it two years ago and that Satya Nadella dropped in here a few months ago. This public-private partnership is a unique meeting ground for the state government and industry, where Krishnan plays a lead role.
One more person that industry loves to talk about is KTR, who holds an MBA degree in Marketing and E-commerce from City University of New York along with a Master’s in Biotechnology from Pune University. His past stint as an IT professional in the US makes him that much more accessible to businesses. The 41-year-old son of Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao “is just a phone call away” — that’s how an executive at a large business group described industry’s equation with the state’s IT and communication minister. At a recent event, KTR made a point. That is, if any company shares with Telangana government an offer it has received from another state, he would either meet the offer or beat it. That explains Telangana’s top slot in ease of doing business complete with single-window clearances and self-certification. The corporate world thinks ease of doing business here is for real, at least for now.
