The Day the Chariot Moved

There is an India hiding in plain sight, asking us to pull the chariot. Mindtree co-founder Subroto Bagchi returns to BIC, where he spoke in 2006 at one of the earliest programmes, to chart how his idea of the entrepreneur has changed across twenty years. What does “entrepreneur” mean once you meet the people who truly keep the world moving? After four decades in the corporate sector, he answered Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s call to work with the Government of Odisha, spending eight years there largely on skill development. In this talk, he will explore a new version of the economy, one built at the grassroots rather than in boardrooms. He will introduce the nano unicorns: ordinary people in small towns, given training and a small grant to build what they see as necessary. He will make the case that skill development is not merely a route to employability but an instrument of human transformation. This talk is part of a series marking twenty years of BIC, in which speakers and artists from the institution’s early years return to revisit the topics they first addressed. Each session traces what has changed, what has endured, and what to make of the same topics two decades on.