Khandekar - MADE IN JAPAN

GROWING UP, ATUL PASWAN had heard in his village in Siwan, Bihar, that there are three kinds of people who are greatly respected: teachers, doctors and the police. Teachers and doctors are respected for their work, but the police force is respected because of the power it wields. Atul came from a family of teachers. His parents, uncles and aunts were in the profession, and there were ten or twelve teachers in the family altogether. But Atul thought teaching was monotonous and wanted a more glamorous profession.

Throughout his childhood, Atul had dreamt of becoming a doctor, even though he didnt know what that actually entailed. His school did not have a laboratory, and zoology was taught solely from textbooks. It was only when he went to Patna, after class twelve, to take coaching for the medical entrance exam, that he fainted after seeing a frog being dissected for the first time. He understood that he did not have it in him to become a doctor.

Today, Atul is neither a doctor nor an engineer. He is president and CEO of Indo-Sakura Software Private Limited. This company designs software, provides consultancy to Japanese companies who wish to set up a business in India and organizes Japanese language-training programmes. Its annual turnover is estimated to be Rs 15 crore. There are twenty-five engineers working with Atul in Japan, and fifteen in India. At just thirty-six years of age, he is the first Dalit industrialist to own a software company. In the past, this sector had been monopolized by Brahmin engineers. Now, luckily, times are changing, and Dalit engineers have started being employed in software companies as well.

Surprisingly, his knowledge of Japanese was what led him on his path to becoming the owner of a business. It was quite a coincidence how Atul ended up studying Japanese. After fainting at the sight of blood at the medical coaching centre in Patna, he had no idea what to do next. He heard from a friend that Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, offers courses in foreign languagesone could go abroad after learning one. Atul took the entrance test, cracked it and chose to study Japanese from JNU.

Delhi was an altogether different world compared to Patna. They were taught in English, which Atul was not very familiar with. The medium of instruction in his school as well as the coaching for entrance exams in Patna had been Hindi. And while the medical entrance test had been in English, it had consisted of objective questions, where one had to just circle the right answer. Atul picked up most of his English from interacting with the other students at JNU. Japanese, of course, was taught in class.

When he graduated in 1997, Atul had figured out that working as a translator or interpreter would be viable only for the next eight or ten yearsit would be difficult to survive in this market as one grew older. He then decided to do get an MBA degree to learn the intricacies of business, and was admitted to the University of Pondicherry.

If Delhi was worlds apart from Siwan, Pondicherry was another universe. Atul says that there were only four north Indian students in the entire university. Studying in Pondicherry brought him closer to the world of software. Bangalore was just an overnight bus journey away. The looming presence of software companies like Infosys and Wipro in the city had put Bangalores name on the map and ensured the creation of a ripple effect in all the big countries of the world. Atuls instinct told him to work in this sector. He says it was ultimately the amount of money that could be made in this field that swayed him.

Though it was difficult to enter the software world without a degree in engineering, Atuls knowledge of Japanese and his MBA degree paved the way for him. He got a job at Fujitsu Limited, one of the leading software companies in Japan and the third largest in the world. Atuls job was to select an Indian company through the bidding process, keep an eye on their work and get the work done from the Indian vendor.

While working at Fujitsu, Atul noticed that Indias big software companies like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys had not been able to grab a foothold in the Japanese market even though they dominated the American and European markets. This was mainly due to the language barrierthe Japanese preferred to conduct business in their own language instead of in English. Before outsourcing their work, Japanese companies liked to ensure that Japanese-speaking persons were part of the projectand there were only a handful of Japanese-speaking engineers in Indian companies. Another hurdle to business was the Japanese hesitation to import goods, part of which stemmed from nationalism. They were willing to sell their goods all over the world, but hesitated to buy from just anyone. After observing the dynamics and peculiarities of this market for four years, Atul was in a good position to launch a company that was customized to cater to the Japanese market.