ET backed the Dream Team all the way

GUTS. Grit. Gumption. With these three words, Vineet Jain, managing director of the Times Group, encapsulated not only the derring-do spirit of the men who changed India - Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his dream team of reformers - but also The Economic Times, the newspaper that supported their initiative from the word ‘go’.

Welcoming the “original sultans of reforms” and 900 of India’s corporate leaders to the ET Awards, he succinctly pointed out that as Dr Singh and his team of visionaries “systematically demolished the Licence Raj,” ET was right there alongside, “demolishing all the arguments that came in the way of Reforms Raj.”

This 15-year-long ideological and emotional bond outlined by Mr Jain through his own experience in the thick of media ferment on reforms, highlighted the raison d’etre of the evening: an ode not only to the winners who symbolise the values that the ET Awards for Corporate Excellence want to promote, but also to the men who made “the impossible possible” by opening up the economy.

He recalled how ET had cheered every reform milestone - in 1991, 1992, 1994, 1997 and beyond - despite naysayers, supporting the tenacity of men making economic history. True to that ethos, Mr Jain said, ET instituted two new awards, for Business Reformer and Policy Change Agent, and was already looking far down the road ahead with new sections in preparation for the second generation reforms. Once again, in tandem with the “men with the Midas touch.”