The Wealth Wallahs

Author- Shreyasi Singh

Publisher- Bloomsbury, Rs499

A growing number of equity dilutions, stake sales and real estate deals have led to a never-before pace of wealth being created and unlocked in India. It has also given way to the emergence of a new group of the first generation wealthy. And these new wealthy are now making waves, writes SHREYASI SINGH. An excerpt:

As a prodigious 15-year-old, Vijay Shekhar Sharma needed special permission to enroll in the Delhi College of Engineering. It is a pattern he would repeat often: Not to let age come in the way. He was rich way before he could get a drink at a bar. At 19, Sharma, the founder of One97 Communications ltd, which runs the company’s flagship e-commerce marketplace Paytm, graduated from the Delhi College of Engineering (DCE). It was 1998. It was an exciting time for India. The internet was expanding its grip as a business. Sharma decided to ditch the Rs1,600 ($24) a month job — the highest salary on the DCE campus that year — to work on the web portal and search engine he had started with his friend Harinder Pal Singh Takhar in their dorm room.

Barely 12 months later, living Media India, owners of the India Today Group, acquired his start-up. Apart from a search engine and webguided services, they had built an election tracking software. India Today bought it for half a million dollars. They used it to cover the general elections of 1999. It was the election in which the Bharatiya Janata Party led National Democratic Alliance formed a stable Government for the first time. Thanks to the part-cash, part-contractual agreement — the start-up moved within the studios of the TV network to manage their web operations — Sharma had, at the turn of the century, an annual personal income of Rs36 lakh ($54,000). Every 15 days, there would be a deposit of Rs1.5 lakh ($2,250) in his bank account. ‘In many countries, you get voting rights only at 21 but by that age, I was earning more money than my father had earned in his lifetime,’ Sharma says.

Growing up in Aligarh in the 1980s and 1990s, Sharma’s first sense of what money was came from the

Rs2 lakh ($3,000) his father, a school teacher, had borrowed; that amount would prove to be enough to completely throw into disarray his family’s cash flows, and be a burden that would ominously hang over his childhood. ‘We didn’t have any extra money beyond our basic needs of food and education, literally, not one extra rupee to spend,’ he says. Even then, his early successes and the windfall from his first venture didn’t impress his parents who had been very disappointed when Sharma had refused jobs in big companies to opt for working on his own. ‘People didn’t think living in India was a mark of success. If you were here, starting a company nobody had heard of, it made you a loser. If it wasn’t Infosys, or Wipro, who were youIJ’ he says. Worse, his parents were suspicious of his good fortune, convinced that there was no way somebody as young as him could have come into such a windfall by selling an obscure, unknown company. ‘My cousin spied on me for a few weeks, even visiting our office on weekends to make sure it really existed,’ he laughs.

Sharma is part of a select group of entrepreneurs behind India’s most talked-about “unicorns” or technology companies that are valued at more than a billion dollars. At its last fundraising round in September 2015 in which Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and its finance arm Ant Financial put in more than $500 million (Rs3,336 crore) in the company, news reports said Paytm was valued at anything between $3.4 billion to $4 billion (Rs22,689 crore to Rs26,694 crore). Along with Flipkart, Amazon India and Snapdeal, Paytm, which started as a mobile payment solutions company in early 2010 is locked in a high-decibel, high-visibility war for India’s e-commerce space. Sharma is reported to own about 21 per cent in the company and, at that valuation, has personal holdings worth $800 million (around Rs5,000 crore).

India has witnessed an unprecedented phase of wealth creation over the past two decades, a trend that has sharply accelerated in the past 10 years.

India’s wealth increased by $2.284 trillion (Rs15,24,227 crore) between 2000 and 2015, making it one of the world’s fastest growing economies with a 211 per cent increase in overall wealth, according to Credit Suisse. A growing number of equity dilutions, stake sales and real estate deals have led to this never-before pace of wealth being created and unlocked in India; it has also given way to the emergence of a new group of the first generation wealthy. Be it cut-throat deals or generosity, it’s the new wealthy who are making waves.

let’s take a look at Shanghai-based Hurun’s India Philanthropy list of 2014, for example. Seventy-three per cent of the people named on the list, on the criteria that they must give away Rs10 crore (Rs1.5 million) or more in philanthropy, were self-made. India’s economic progress has provided the bedrock for this growth, expanding as it has from being a $1-trillion (Rs66,73,500 crore) economy in terms of its GDP in 2007 to double of that by 2015. To put it simply, it has taken India just seven years to add another trillion dollars to its GDP compared to the nearly 60 it took us to accumulate the first trillion. This has spawned new businesses and industries, giving way to market opportunities for business owners and entrepreneurs to exploit. In the past 15 years itself, the size of the Indian economy has grown by more than four times.

Edited excerpt from The Wealth Wallahs written by Shreyasi Singh and published by Bloomsbury, Rs499