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Some people are here on this planet to accomplish their cherished dream. Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder, Chairman and
Managing Director of Bharti Group is one such
personality belonging to that rare tribe. While on a vacation
to Singapore during the early 1980s he saw a
hawker selling a push button phone by the
roadside. Visualizing the utility value of the instrument
he thought of introducing similar equipment into
the Indian market. The rest is historythe success saga of India's most ambitious
telecom entrepreneur.
Mittal was born on June 15, 1950 in Ludhiana, Punjab. He graduated from Punjab University.
His father Sri Sat Paul Mittal, a Parliamentarian,
was always in the public eye. Probably that is the reason why he remains so close to people with
his entrepreneurial initiatives. Mittal is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School, MA, USA.
Bharti Mittal had been interested in business
right from his teenage days and, thus, had started
his career at the young age of 18 with a modest
capital. He got together with his friend and started a
small bicycle business. But by the late 1970s he
realized that the business would remain small. So
he thought of moving out of Ludhiana, spent a few years in Mumbai, and in 1981 he was running
an import and distribution operation of portable generators out of New Delhi and Mumbai.
The business was good initially, but it ran into
rough weather when the government banned the
import of generators as two Indian companies were awarded licenses to manufacture them in
India. The year 1986 saw Mittal founding the
Bharti Telecom Limited, which started
manufacturing electronic push button phones.
Though Bharti Enterprise was in existence, the first break happened only in 1986 when he set
up Bharti Telecom, signing a collaboration with Siemens to manufacture the country's first
push button telephones. Private participation in
telecom was really a peripheral activity to the
monolithic government monopoly public convenience services during those days. His major
turnaround came in 1992, when the government began
issuing licenses for mobile phone services for the
first time. Bharti was recognized more as a manufacturer of phone instruments. There
was, therefore, a little surprise that the high
profile Delhi GSM mobile circle had gone to Bharti Cellular Ltd., |
