ET Awards for Corporate Excellence: Celebrating the makers of a new India

On Saturday evening, arch foes in the marketplace left behind their rivalries to celebrate the success of peers, brought together by the ET Awards for Corporate Excellence. Wolfgang Prock-Shauer, CEO of GoAir, was at hand to congratulate IndiGo’s Aditya Ghosh for securing the Emerging Company of the Year award. “It’s a great achievement and this will motivate us as well,” Prock Shauer told Ghosh on the sidelines.

Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, winner of the Entrepreneur of the Year award, said the ET Awards were “Oscars of business awards” in India. As India takes tentative steps toward a cashless economy, Sharma’s business is expected to play an important role in traversing that route and facilitating e-payments. If the mood in the marketplace is one of concern over the after-effects of demonetisation, India’s entrepreneurs did not seem too worried about it. It came up constantly in conversations at the event and even in the acceptance speeches of some of the winners.

Notably, an inkling of how winners think differently from the rest can be gauged from the comments of Natarajan Chandrasekaran, CEO of Tata Consultancy Services, the Tata group’s most valuable company. He made a point of acknowledging the role of bankers in his acceptance speech for Business Leader of the Year award. “I am really saying this from the bottom of my heart. There are many bankers here in this room, they need to be saluted for what they have done in the last six weeks,” Chandrasekaran said. “There are issues here and there, but the amount of effort they have put in, not at the CEO level alone, but at the management level, and people have gone beyond the call of duty day in and day out.”


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Pawan Goenka, MD of Mahindra & Mahindra, India’s largest utility vehicle maker, was in a buoyant mood. “I think the mood here is positive. Listening to the four senior ministers will leave everyone with a positive outlook and it is not unjustified,” he said. He also got a suggestion from Union minister for road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari that Mahindra check out areas close to his hometown Nagpur to build a new factory.

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At the dinner table, after the awards ceremony, some businessmen declared an appetite for investments at a time when the world is staring at a slowdown. Ajay Piramal, chairman of Piramal Group, wondered about investment opportunities in the infrastructure space. Gadkari, and no prizes for guessing, recommended roads and ports as the sectors that would do well. Piramal, who’s developed a winning habit of investing and exiting at the right time, may be one of the contrarian investors in this period of uncertainty.

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“It is great to recognise success and excellence. It definitely gives a huge amount of impetus to the winner, and to those who try for them to try harder,” said Pawan Munjal, chairman of Hero MotoCorp, India’s largest motorcycle maker by volume. The ET Awards is not only a celebration of success, but also a place where business relationships get strengthened. State Bank of India chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya successfully sought appointments with Gadkari’s office and Indigo boss Aditya Ghosh, who was being courted by many bankers. Another person in demand was Sharma of Paytm.


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Mahindra’s Goenka, intrigued by the business model, spent a significant amount of time with him discussing the digital wallet world. Paytm can help people move transactions from card to mobile phones, and he says, with the digital wallet becoming bigger, transaction cost will become zero or negative.