1950His grandmother starts a school. She set it up with Aruna Asaf Ali and Tara Ali Baig to uplift destitute women, teaching them skills so they could become useful members of society. His mother later ran it as director and worked with a leprosy colony. He names his grandmother his biggest mentor.
1983He passes out, and goes to Kuwait instead. He had one of the highest-paying jobs going at the time in hand. His parents were in Iraq, he stopped over in Kuwait on the way back from visiting them, and his father sat him down: the Iran-Iraq war would end, opportunity would follow it, so try a business and come home in two or three years if it fails. He went, and found no ecosystem around him at all.
1998Ranchi, and the signature that moves 25,000 people. Heading Shriram Bearings, he met Rana Sangram Singh of the HEC union, about 35,000 members, who did the arithmetic for him: 1,200 workers with families of five or six, 180 officers with families of four, plus vendors, suppliers and the whole village of Ratu that lived off them. The second lesson that day was about how he had spoken to the man who brought the tea.
2016IIM Calcutta Innovation Park is carved out. IIM Calcutta is a teaching institute, so the board set up a Section 8 company that could sit outside government rules and work exclusively in rural and semi-rural areas. Jain puts the Park at about ten years old.
2019+The Northeast becomes the work. Seven years across the villages and small towns of Assam and Manipur, with the state governments and under the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. The region supplies 2 to 3 per cent of Indian entrepreneurship and his stated task is to take that to 10.
2025Meghalaya pineapples reach the UAE. The Lulu Group took 10 to 12 tonnes out of the belt between Shillong and Guwahati, the first time fruit from an area he calls the sweetest in the world got out of it. Assam is building a logistics hub outside Guwahati for the whole region.
Today2,500 startups, and a failure rate under 20 per cent. More than 20,000 direct jobs and 10 million lives touched by the Park's own survey, against a national startup failure figure of 90 per cent, held there by a monthly MIS that gets chased in person when it does not arrive. Of roughly 700 incubators in India, he counts 25 to 30 as profitable.
2047A billion lives. The vision he sets against Viksit Bharat: from 10 million to a billion, starting with street vendors already funded under the Svanidhi scheme whom nobody has gone back to check on, and an alumni-funded AIF that is still in the planning stage.
