Newsweek magazine's international edition has devoted a full length cover story on Mukesh Ambani, describing him as India's most influential businessman and one who thinks bigger than the rest.The latest edition of the news magazine which will hit the stands on July 17 says ''India's top tycoon hopes to kick the country's nascent boom into hyperdrive by re-making its stores, farms and even its biggest cities''.
It said Ambani was all that even before a bitter internal feud led to a split in his family conglomerate. The breakup, finalized in January, left him in control of the larger (and largely etrochemical) share, Reliance Industries, and that behemoth has seen its fortunes soar ever since.
Calling him ''India's M. Big Idea'', the cover story written by the magazine's Southeast Asia Correspondent Ron Moreau and Special Correspondent Sudip Mazumdar, says Ambani, 49, has finalized plans to invest more than 11 billion dollar over the next decade to build two new satellite cities outside Mumbai and Delhi.
Ambani plans, according to the storty, to invest five billion dollar by 2011 to put both farms and stores on the road to modernity, connect them through a distribution system guided by the latest logistics technology and create enough of a surplus to generate 20 billion dollar in agricultural exports annually.
If his plan succeeds, it says, consumers will get fresher food at lower prices, rural incomes will soar, farmers will become active consumers and Reliance will become ''a Wal Mart in India''.
The agricultural export boom will bring India's farmers into the global economy, as IT has done for its college grads. ''We are rebalancing the world,'' says Ambani in the story. ''We are in fact lucky to be at the right place at the right time, contributing to our self-confidence as Indians. That's what energizes me.'' It's a vision in which everyone wins, which helps explain the silence of any doubters.
According to the story, Ambani's favourite scheme aims to revolutionize in one swoop two of India's largest but most backward sectors: farming and retail.
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