NE BUSINESS BUREAU
NEW DELHI, DEC 9
Books on HDFC Bank’s digital revolution and the journeys of Flipkart, BigBasket, and Hero are among the six works shortlisted for the Gaja Capital Business Book Prize 2020.
Instituted by equity firm Gaja Capital last year, the Rs 15-lakh prize is awarded annually to celebrate the best non-fiction books on contemporary Indian business.
The shortlisted books are “HDFC Bank 2.0” by Tamal Bandopadhyay; “Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story” by Mihir Dalal; Katherine Eban’s “Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma”; “The Making of Hero: Four Brothers, Two Wheels, and a Revolution that Shaped India” by Sunil Munjal; T N Hari and M S Subramanian”s “Saying No to Jugaad: The Making of BigBasket” and “The Moonshot Game: Adventures of an Indian Venture Capitalist” by Rahul Chandra.
“The last two decades demonstrate that Indian business is telling new stories and finding new paths. The chroniclers of Indian business stories endure painstaking efforts to capture the romance, struggle, and joys of entrepreneurship. The Gaja Capital Business Book Prize is created to honour these travellers, their journeys, and their chroniclers,” the presenters said.
According to jury chairman Manish Sabharwal, “The felt the shortlist this year has multiple stories of triumph and tragedy yet mostly reflects a new breed of confident, ambitious and rising corporate India.”
The winner will be announced in January. The jury comprised investors, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and policy-makers.
The inaugural prize was won in 2019 by Girish Kuber for his book “The Tatas: How a Family Built a Business and a Nation”.
Gopal Jain, managing partner at Gaja Capital, said business bookshelves are dominated by western stories of business and entrepreneurship.
“As the Indian economy scales and the Indian entrepreneurial and investor ecosystem matures, we will have many more stories and lessons for the world, from India. Investors and entrepreneurs in the Indian market, we have witnessed several such journeys first-hand,” he said.
“We would like to make a small contribution in encouraging Indian writers, journalists, and entrepreneurs to tell our stories and tell them well, for the world,” he added.
