No doubt that Sunil Mittal — no relation with London-based steel tycoons Lakshmi and Promod Mittal, who are brothers — has built his business empire in one generation all-through hard work and a lot of imagination and support from India's policy makers on foreign investments, direct or indirect. But, that does not give him the liberty to undervalue or undermine other true Indian multinational corporations to over expose his own somewhat fictional achievement.

Strictly speaking, Bharti Airtel is neither truly Indian, nor does it become the biggest Indian multinational company after the part acquisition of the Kuwaiti telecom company. Like behind car-maker Maruti's success is Japan's Suzuki Motors, to a good extent behind Bharti's achievement is Singapore Telecom (SingTel). Maruti is now a Suzuki company. In a way, Bharti is a SingTel company though not many ordinary Bharti shareholders may be aware of it. In fact, the brand Airtel is designed on the lines of SingTel. The foreign holding in Bharti is substantial, above 73 per cent. This includes the holdings of foreign institutional investors (FIIs). SingTel, South-East Asia's largest telecom company, holds 32 per cent in Bharti. Vodafone of the UK holds 5.6 per cent in Bharti. This makes Bharti more a SingTel company than a Sunil Mittal enterprise. And, Bharti's Africa acquisition can at best be explained as SingTel's strategic move to tap Bharti's surplus financial resources to enter African markets to expand its business interest at no direct risk to its shareholders. Sunil Mittal may have just played a pawn in SingTel's shrewd move.

Sunil Mittal became the principal promoter of Bharti with the help of the government's early FDI policy in cellular telephone service business which didn't, at that time, allow majority foreign stake and outside management control in this sector. The government's post-reform permit raj through FDI control and sectoral decontrol has helped create several opportunist Indian businessmen, boasting strong political and bureaucratic connections, overnight-billionaires. The policy has since been changed in the telecom sector, helping a few initial Indian promoters to make billions by selling their stake later to foreign investors. Among the other early private entrants in telecom were Kolkata's B.K. Jhawar, Delhi's B. K. Modi and Mumbai's Ruia brothers, Ravi and Shashi.

The government's post-reform permit raj, if one analyses correctly, has also helped the back-door entry and business control of enterprises, originally meant to be majority Indian entities for strategic reasons, by foreign multinationals. This has happened in the telecom and banking sectors. India's two top private sector local banks, which originally owe their existence to the government, are no longer Indian. The banks - ICICI and HDFC - are now majority foreign-owned through back-door share deals, all legal. The insurance sector is the next where the government is likely to allow majority foreign control. Such a policy change is, once again, expected to make several more Indian billionaires, rather effortlessly and all within a very short time.

Many western analysts feel that SingTel, which is promoted by the Singapore government's wholly-owned investment arm Temasek Holdings, used Bharti to indirectly expand its business to Africa. The Bharti-Zain deal is being partly financed by Temasek, which is also helping in raising loans for Bharti. It is not known, though, why Sunil Mittal chose Amsterdam to sign the Zain deal instead of Delhi or Kuwait. Interestingly, Zain's Africa assets are spread over nearly 20 countries, including Sudan and Morocco. Bharti has reportedly purchased them all, except those in Sudan and Morocco, both known to be Al Qaeda hubs. Zain's assets in some 15 African countries are hardly large in terms of the customer base and profitability. Zain's combined customer strength in all those 15 African countries is only 42 million, or less than a third of Bharti's subscribers' base in India.

The claim that the latest Bharti overseas business acquisition will make the company the biggest Indian multinational enterprise is, thus, considered to be a piece of saucy braggadocio, without much substance. Tata Steel's acquisition of Anglo-Duch Corus (formerly, British Steel Corporation) at a cost of US$ 12.1 billion is till date the biggest Indian overseas corporate take-over. Tata Steel is not only India's largest multinational enterprise, but also the largest foreign industrial employer in the United Kingdom, providing direct jobs to some 40,000 British workers in England. The Tatas are by far the biggest owners and management controllers of Indian multinational enterprises. The companies include Tata Motors (owner of Jaguar-Land Rover), Tata Tea (owner of Tetley), TCS, Tata Chemicals and Indian Hotels. They are truly Indian MNCs. Other such Indian MNCs, using the mega-acquisition route to make their presence felt in the global market, include Hindalco, an A V Birla enterprise which took over Novelis of the US for $ 6 billion, entertainment tsar Subhas Chandra's Essel Packaging, ONGC, Wipro, Wockhardt, Infosys, Ranbaxy (since taken over by the Japanese), Bharat Forge and J K Tyre. Novelis is a global leader in aluminum flat-rolled products. Essel took over Switzerland's packaging firm, Propack, and renamed it as Essel Propack. Mexican tyre giant Tornell is now in the pocket of the Singhanias of J K Industries, India's second largest automotive tyre producer.

However, it was the late Aditya Vikram Birla, who showed the way to Indian entrepreneurs how to fulfill their ambition to emerge as promoters of MNCs. In the 1970s, Aditya Birla had overcome the country's strict foreign exchange control regime to set up a number of enterprises in South-East Asia by bartering India-made capital goods for financial contribution. The most prominent among them was Thai Rayon, which became a world leader within no time. For many years, Thai Rayon was one of the most sought-after scrips in the Bangkok bourses. Next came the late Lalit Mohan Thapar, co-promoter of Phoenix Paper, the world's largest paper pulp manufacturer, also based in Thailand. They were set up at a time when RBI did not allow direct foreign exchange investment by Indian companies in overseas locations. That was the time when RBI allowed only up to $ 100 per Indian for travel abroad under its repressive foreign travel allowance (FTA) scheme. It is only in recent times that Indians are allowed the freedom to draw foreign exchange from RBI to study, travel, invest and also gamble abroad. This has created a tremendous excitement among those capable and ambitious Indian entrepreneurs to make their global presence. The RBI data reveals that the cumulative outward movement of FDI from India, which was only to the tune of $ 500 million in 1995, jumped to $ 62 billion at the end of 2008. Unfortunately, not many of these Indian enterprises abroad have been able to show good profits and repatriate dividends back to the country. On the contrary, huge losses incurred by ICICI Bank and the State Bank of India in US operations in 2007 and 2008 were required to be covered directly by both their profitable India business and also by RBI, indirectly. (IPA Service)