About Me

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Mumbai, India
I run an IT Security consulting firm based out of India. We started off from scratch in 2001 when I was 21, and have offices in Mumbai, Bahrain, and UAE. The idea behind the blog is to share the stories of how we run the business, the deals we make, the deals that break, the heartburn, and the sheer joy.

The Ultimate Startup Guide

The Ultimate Startup Guide is an e-book that provides answers to all your questions related to starting and growing a business in India. Everything you wanted to know about entrepreneurship in India from ideation to registration to marketing to hiring. The book contains a large number of practical examples, anecdotes, interviews, and motivational material to help you get started, and to grow rapidly in a booming Indian economy. If you've got the idea, this book will help you through with the execution and realize your dreams. Here are some of the key questions you will find answered in this book:
  • When starting a business, what are the legal issues involved?
  • What form of incorporation is better suited to which type of business?
  • What tax issues are involved?
  • How do I start a business and what are the pitfalls?
  • How do I market my business in the absence of significant funding?
  • How do I get funded?
  • What are the basic accounting concepts I should be aware of?
  • What is a business plan and how should I build one?
The brief table of contents of the book is as follows:
  1. Getting started
  2. Ideation
  3. Forms of Enterprises
  4. Funding
  5. Basic Accounting and Taxation
  6. Import and Export Licensing
  7. Trademark and Patenting
  8. Rules for NRIs and Foreigners
  9. Building a Business Plan
  10. Marketing on a Shoestring
  11. Website and Branding
  12. Women Entrepreneurs
  13. Templates
To order the Ultimate Startup Guide - email me at kkmookhey@gmail.com.

Details of the book are:
Title: The Ultimate Startup Guide
Author: Kanwal Mookhey
Pages: 150
Additional: Companion CD contains numerous templates for building your business plan, calculating cashflow, preparing profit and loss, and balance sheets, preparing invoices, your resume and profile, marketing material, websites, contracts, and many other useful and motivational material.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Brilliant idea, I say!

For all the buzz about India's economic progress, the fact of the matter is that a large majority of the population lives in poverty. Government policies and schemes in this regard have been outright populist and hardly visionary at all.

I remember a conversation I once had with an IIM Kolkata professor about entrepreneurship. And the talk turned to how the economic changes could be made more broad-based. And he said, I had a very conservative outlook on agriculture, but have come around to the view that the only way out is for the privatisation of agriculture. Given that over 60% of the population still depends on agriculture for its main source of income, any reforms are going to be very narrow unless they begin to address agricultural reform. One of the problems he mentioned was that it was very difficult to privatize farming in the current situation. Even when the government provides subsidies for something as simple as pumps, the fact that landholdings are so small and often non-contiguous means that a farmer cannot even take advantage of a pump, since he may not have the one acre of contiguous arable land that would make the use of a pump feasible. Privatization would mean, collective farming, pooling together of resources, availability of capital, and introduction of modern farming methods.

But after 50 years of Nehruvian socialism, and inspite of the past few years of reform, the idea that agriculture should or can be privatized would create a furore, raising visions of behemoths such as Cargill swallowing land and resources and pumping billions of dollars out of the country.

In such a scenario, comes Mukesh Ambani's refreshing ideas on what his vision for the country is. Read this excellent write up at Newsweek:

"Ambani plans to invest $5 billion by 2011 to put both the farms and the 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 in agricultural exports annually."

Read also, Atanu Dey's comments at the Indian Economy Blog. If Ambani can pull this off, he will cement his place in the Hall of Fame of legendary businessmen, and free up the immense potential in the farming and retail sectors in a potential market of 1 billion people. And hopefully then, India will truly be shining.

2 comments:

Raghav said...

nice piece of info here..

Kanwal K Mookhey said...

Pinkbury, yes that was a neat move. In any case, the inefficiences that plague governmental and quasi-governmental enterprises of this sort, are nice opportunities for private enterprise to address. For instance, food distribution is one of the most highly inefficient operations in the country right now.

raghav, thanks!