PACESETTER RAMAN MITTAL
Tractor Turk
As executive director of Sonalika International Tractors, 27-year-old Raman Mittal is heralding newer benchmarks in the Indian tractor market
Anandita Gupta

HIS bloodline might have catapulted him into the boss’s swivel chair, but Raman Mittal was more than willing to roll up his sleeves and get down to business from the shop floor upwards. Which is why at 27, Mittal is at the helm of Sonalika Tractors Group, a Rs 5000-crore conglomerate with business interests ranging from engines to agricultural implements, generator sets, auto finance and automotive components.

Though born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, this third-generation entrepreneur was not content with being known only as LD Mittal’s grandson. Completely hands on with the tractor business he was in line to inherit, he dug deep into the logistics of the workplace to come up with formulae he believed in.

Today, Sonalika features among the top three Indian tractor manufacturers, growing 20 per cent year-on-year. Under Raman Mittal, Sonalika manufactured 45,000 tractors in 2010, as against 38,000 tractors in 2008-2009. "This year, I’m looking at manufacturing 330 tractors per day to achieve my dream target of Rs 1 lakh tractors annually," he shares enthusiastically.

Young Mittal is also the leading player in heralding India’s tractor market’s nano moment, "We’re focusing on smaller, low-cost (sub-Rs 2 lakh) tractors to attract the cost-conscious, marginal farmers," says a buoyant Mittal.

With Raman aggressively hitting the export market, Sonalika is exporting to the US and Australia, besides Romania, Africa and the SAARC regions. As the Executive Director of the Sonalika subsidiary, International Tractors Ltd (ITL), Mittal has tied up with MG Rover, UK that provided the requisite technical know-how for the Rhino, launched in 2006. His company ICML has now tied up with styling house Pininfarina to launch an absolutely new ‘world car’ from the Sonalika stable. "We call it Pininfarina World Cup project. It is a new platform which we want to develop, an SUV, a crossover in the future. We are sure it has to be an international car, styled and engineered in Italy with the Indian cost sensibilities."

The 27-year-entrepreneur makes his d`E9but in Car India’s Power Personalities this year. With so many achievements firmly tucked under his belt, Raman Mittal is bound to create a bigger name for himself.

CENTRESPREAD: Track these tablets
Track these tablets
With the unveiling of the world’s cheapest tablets, the drawing of battle lines for tablet wars in India became loud and clear. Divyanshu Dutta Roy reports

FAR away from all the frenzy in Barcelona that played centre of the universe of the month for the tech world, a modest announcement closer home seemed to ring with more meaning for India this February than all of the glitz and glamour at the exotic Spanish city combined.

While it’s hard to argue that nearly any of the launches and declarations at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona were inconsequential or unexciting, the announcement of yet another homegrown el cheapo tablet truly drove home the fact that the device, still indisputably in its nascent age, has begun coming of age.

Backed by India’s public sector carrier BSNL and made by yet another nondescript hardware company, the Penta T-Pad IS701R is the eagerly awaited device, one that is all set to take on the fabled " $35 India tablet" Aakash.

And while Aakash, perhaps the most hyped tablet to come of India since the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, fell short of making good its promise of coming at $35 (around Rs 1,700), the Rs 2,499-priced tablet that eventually saw the light of day, did arguably unlock a realm of possibilities.

The T-Pad IS701R, made by Pantel Technologies, and rocking almost-decent specs is proof of that. Sporting a 1GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, a 7-inch resistive screen and the Android 2.3 platform, the T-Pad not only matches both Aakash and its upcoming ‘sequel’ Aakash 2 or Ubislate 7, but also actually one-ups them in some features.

With thousands of Akakshes sold in the past few months and both websites of Pantel and Ubislate-maker Datawind accepting pre-orders for the next line of inexpensive devices, one has to admit that the tablets in India have begun to find their footing, and one that is quite distinct form the iPad-driven frenzy of the West. But how did we get here?

Humble beginnings

The modern-day concept of a tablet computer dates back to as early as 1968 with the Dynabook concept created by an American Alan Kay that proposed a device with nearly eternal battery life and software aimed at giving users, primarily children, access to digital media. But arguably it was not until Microsoft’s first attempts during the early 2000s to define the tablet personal computer (tablet PC) product concept that the idea of touch-based portable device started to garner mainstream attention. These devices, mostly running a specially designed version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and its subsequent 2005 update, however, failed to achieve widespread adoption due mainly to price and usability problems.

Enter Apple

By 2010, Apple was ruling much of the consumer tech world and riding on a fresh high from the wildly successful iPhone launched in 2007, the Cupertino-based company had begun to position itself as the pioneer of modern-day touch technology.

While the hardware for tablets have existed in one form or the other for quite some time and only needed certain tweaks, engineers at Apple realised that it was the software that needed to be rethought and revolutionised. Apple decided to scale up a mobile OS — originally made for its iPhone — for a tablet device. The iPad was finally released in April 2010 in the US and sold 3,00,000 units in the first day, heralding a new phenomenon in mobile computing.

New World

Despite criticism over the device’s usability, the iPad opened the floodgates to an untapped segment. "A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them," Apple co-founder and Chairman Steve Jobs had once famously said in 1998. Almost single-handedly prying open a virgin market, the Apple iPad showed how for things like watching movies, listening to music, reading books, communicating, desktop and laptop computers were just not convenient enough.

India Calling

While in most Western markets, including the US, the iPad began selling for around $500 onwards, considered quite inexpensive, in India, the same price, even when directly converted translated to around a formidable Rs 25,000. This price ensured that while in its home country, the iPad sold like hot cakes, in the value-conscious Indian market, where consumers were invariably distracted by better featured notebooks and netbooks at similar prices, it could not gain much leeway.

Also Apple’s move to not officially sell iPads in India till after about eight months of its US launch, paved the way for other manufacturers to pounce on the opportunity. In October 2010, Olive Telecom’s OlivePad became the first widely available tablet in India.

The Indian market was, thereafter, bombarded by domestic and international players. Olive conceded its initial lead to the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab range, Motorola’s Xoom and a host of low-priced offerings.

Start-up Indian manufacturers like Lakshmi Access Communications Systems (LACS) and Notion Ink have joined the fray while companies like Bharti Teletech, Karbonn, Spice Telecom and Lava Mobiles, that have already wrestled one-third of the 150-million-units-per-annum cellphone handset market from established players, are hoping to replicate their success in the tablet arena.

Big players who had not yet entered the tablet market like Sony announced their foray with a splash by the end 2011 while BlackBerry maker RIM and Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC said they hope to expand their current presence of PlayBook and Flyer models. Not to be left behind, PC manufacturers like Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asus and HCL have also launched or announced their devices.

And while aggressive launches by the country’s smartphone leader Samsung started heating up the Indian tablet space, it was not until the launch of Aakash and the closely shadowed announcement of the T-Pad, that it could have been said to have touched base.

The devices, affordable enough even for students in villages to snap up, really seem as a solid bid to bridge the digital divide in India, where barely one in 10 persons have internet access, and also in some cases as the beginning of India’s tablet prime time.