Toronto Star Columnist - An Abstract
By Paul Watson
The shock of a monstrous earthquake convinced Roshan Shah it was time to make the jump to Canada.
A health scare, and a new-found love of enterprise, pulled him back to India.
Now, with one foot in Ahmedabad and another in Vancouver, the Canadian businessman is among thousands of “reverse immigrants” forging vital new economic bridges that span the planet.
Just five years ago, he was jobless and worried about the future. Today he’s a millionaire, energized by seemingly limitless opportunities opening up with tectonic shifts in the global economy.
In India, old bureaucratic walls are gradually crumbling, shaking up corrupt and inefficient systems, freeing up a younger, impatient generation itching to compete against the world’s best.
Shah, 36, speaks of that spirit with revolutionary fervour, as if small business and innovation can become a movement that transforms a nation.
“I want to take entrepreneurship to schools, to the grassroots level, so that when students come out, they can challenge their parents and say, ‘Business is what I want to do,’” Shah insists.
That faith has come from some very hard knocks.
The ground beneath Shah was still shaking with aftershocks from the massive Gujarat earthquake, which killed some 20,000 people and injured another 167,000 on January 26, 2001, when he decided it was time to get out of India.
The next day, the computer engineer sent in his application and cheque for a visa to immigrate to Canada with his wife and their two young sons.
He’d left before, first to Singapore and then to the U.S. Each time, he soon found himself back in Gujarat, in western India, still drawn to a bigger world.
When he felt the land of his birth buck violently beneath him, threatening to destroy all that he loved, Shah took the hint. He was eager to flee for good.
“There was devastation all around,” he said. “During that time, there was lack of water and resources. Government corruption was very high. I just wanted to run away from the place.”
On September 28, 2004, Shah and his family landed in Toronto. Within 20 days, three companies wanted to hire him to manage information technology projects.
He seemed destined for the middle road, a salaried employee, good at what he did, but unlikely to get very far because he worked for someone else.
“Nobody told me that I should go into business,” Shah said. “And if you ask your manager a business question, how it all happens, they’ll shut you down with, ‘Just do programming and don’t ask questions.’
“If I’d been mentored in those years, I’d be at least 10 years ahead of where I am today.”
It took another bad turn of fate to get Shah on that right path, the one that led him to good fortune.
He developed a kidney disease in 2005. Shah’s wife, Rina, the 42nd candidate offered by his parents when they arranged his marriage in India, wanted him to stay home from work and rest.
She tried to support the family as a farmworker, picking and packing tomatoes. She started each day at 4 a.m., got back home at 9 p.m., and after two back-breaking weeks in the tomato fields, Rina called it quits.
Too sick to work, facing an 11-month wait to see a kidney specialist in B.C., and worried that his sons’ schools were too slack, Shah made the move back to India.
Here he can see a good doctor whenever he wants, and chase business dreams as fast as they come to mind.
The computer engineer once clueless about the ways of business is now a serial entrepreneur largely because, as bad luck would have it, he was laid off before falling ill.
While Shah collected Employment Insurance benefits in Canada, he qualified for training in ‘How to Start and Run a Business at the Self-Employment and Entrepreneur Development Society (SEEDS).
As a class assignment during 10 months at SEEDS, he wrote and refined a detailed business plan, under the close supervision of the non-profit agency’s mentors.
They helped rewire a techie’s brain for venture capitalism. And now he is a millionaire.
New ways of making money pop into his head as easily as most of us conjure up excuses to spend it.
“I had zero value when I was laid off and within three years I have 40 business ideas,” he gushed. “I own three private limited companies I own three offices. I own four residential plots. I own a huge, huge apartment. I have a theatre in my home.”
The company he conceived as a class project, BPO Canada Global Services, provides website design and other outsourced services to more than 200 clients. Shah also owns Gloscon, another web design and development firm with 21 employees in Ahmedabad.
He is branching out into the medical tourism business with Kosansh.com, a site that helps foreign patients get high-quality, affordable health care at hospitals such as the Muljibhai Patel Urological Hospital.
The kidney treatment facility, about an hour’s drive from Ahmedabad, has cutting edge robotic surgery equipment. Shah has at least 25 other businesses in development, and more are percolating up in his mind.
India’s economic surge is usually seen as a race with its richer, more powerful neighbour, China.
China, which passed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy behind the U.S. in summer 2010, produced almost CAD $5 trillion of goods and services in 2009.
That’s a gross domestic product nearly four times bigger than India’s, according to the World Bank, even though China’s population is only slightly bigger.
But to get anywhere close to the likes of China and others in the economic big leagues, India first has to overcome its nearest competitor. That’s Canada. And India is close on our heels.
Canada’s $1.34 trillion economy ranks 10th on the World Bank’s country rankings. India is right behind, in 11th place, with a $1.3 trillion economy in 2009.
India’s economy is expected grow more than 8 per cent, while Canada’s sputters ahead at around 2 per cent. It won’t be long before India knocks Canada out of the Top Ten world economies.
India is a country rich in contradictions, where inequality, graft, shortages of power and clean water and myriad other problems wear down some, but toughen up others into hard-nosed competitors.
The world’s largest population of illiterates lives in India, where two-thirds of adults cannot read or write. Yet India has the world’s third-largest higher education system, with more than 300 universities and 16,000 colleges.
Malnutrition is more common in India than sub-Saharan Africa, according to UNICEF, the UN children’s fund. The agency says one in three of the world’s malnourished children live in India.
Yet two Indians are in Forbes magazines top five list of the world’s billionaires in 2010: Mukesh Ambani, an oil and petrochemical tycoon, ranked fourth, with an estimated net worth of U.S. $29 billion. Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian steel baron living in London, was close behind in fifth place, with U.S. $28.7 billion.
India’s politics pendulum swings so freely from right to left that parties thrive across the spectrum, from brownshirt Hindu extremists to business-friendly Marxists who proudly display the hammer and sickle as they reach out to foreign investors.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its left-wing allies have governed West Bengal state for some 30 years, the world’s longest reign by a democratically elected communist government.
In the political free-for-all, corruption runs amok. One of India’s top management consultants, the late Coimbatore K. Prahalad, put the cost of political corruption at around $60 billion a year, an estimate many Indians consider low.
Another statistic may be India’s greatest hope: some 30 per cent of its 1.13 billion people are below the age of 15.
They are the next wave of youth that is a building force for change, a younger generation that is tired of crooked politicians and bureaucratic bunglers.
Roshan Shah hasn’t been so fortunate. For the past decade, he’s been trying to collect around $12,000 from a relative who bounced a cheque. He’s now waging four lawsuits, including court actions against the bank.
It isn’t about the money, Shah insists. If he ever collects, he plans to donate it to charity. Getting stiffed is so normal in India that others would have shrugged it off long ago as the cost of doing business.
Shah is on a mission, not just to make money, but to cleanse Indian commerce of cheats.
It’s a message he brings constantly to his staff and to students he mentors at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. It’s a principle he hopes that his relative, and his bankers, will learn the hard way in court.
“I just want to make sure they are penalized and people get that lesson that you cannot just get away with it,” Shah said. “It doesn’t matter that it takes time.” Revolutions often do.
