The annual World Economic Forum meeting in India is arguably the country’s highest-powered business gathering, a must-attend talkfest where the bollygarch class take time out to rub shoulders, and herald their own considerable achievements.
But this year’s event, which comes to a close on Thursday just outside smog-bound New Delhi, has been striking for a different reason, leading some participants to muse quietly on an unexpected question: are India’s major tycoons in hiding?
Not too long ago, these industrial titans seemed without equal. The government was hopeless, the thinking went, but India’s “promoters” (as the heads the big conglomerates are often known) were lionised, seemingly with special powers to knock-up world class telecoms networks and whizzy outsourcing centres, while pausing only to strike eye-catching deals around the world.
Yet today, against a backdrop of slowing growth and rising corporate debt, and just at the moment when India’s government actually has re-found some of its reforming zeal, the subcontinent’s big business wheels seem suddenly less cocky — a fact perhaps reflected in how few of them seem to have decided to show face at WEF’s big jamboree.