BW Communities

'We'll Launch A $100 Mn Fund Soon'

BW Online Bureau Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[T.V. Mohandas Pai, for a long time was one of the key public faces for Infosys, first for a 12 year period from 1994, as its Chief Financial Officer and then for a 5-year stint as its Head of HR and Infrastructure. He was seen to be in the running to become the first non-promoter CEO of the company, before surprisingly deciding to move out, after seeming to have lost an internal power struggle. His ESOP's at Infosys have ensured that Mohan, as he is called by everybody, doesn't need to work for a living. However in his post-Infosys innings, as the Chairman of Manipal Universal Learning Pvt, Pai is as determined and driven as always, to help build the next major success story out of Bangalore.     In his modest new office on top of a BMW showroom in central Bangalore, the voluble and charismatic Pai, in an in-depth interview spoke about life after Infosys, plans for Manipal's education business and his other interests. Excerpts : How has life after Infy been? You miss any of the old trappings of power? Look, Infosys is a great company and I was very happy to be associated with it. Played no small role in building what was a $10 million in revenues and 500 people organisation, when I joined, to $6 billion plus with 1.4 lakh employees. I am proud of what we achieved. The Infosys card undoubtedly would open several doors. But people move on for various reasons and I wanted to do different and new things. Also today I have a public persona of my own. At present I spend 85 per cent of my time on Manipal. Am also on various government committees and other activities like Akshaya Patra which consume the rest of my time. I am working with Ranjan who is a great professional and we share a fantastic working relationship. The best part: I walk across to my office from my home, instead of being struck in traffic for hours like in my old job. (laughs).  You definitely don't need the money. How did the association with the Manipal group come about and what is your role in the group? Education has been an area of interest for me for a very long time. India with a GDP of $1.75 trillion is at an inflection point. The next 2 decades are going to be some of the most interesting times for growth in India's history. If we play our cards right, we could be a $9 trillion economy in the next 20 years. The one thing which can turn this into a reality is, if India invests in educating her children. We have 119 million children in schools, with more than a few million left out. The quality might be indifferent but important thing is, they are in school. Things like Sarva Shisksha Abhiyan over the last 10 years have improved things. Contrast this with higher education. Only 13 per cent of our youngsters between the age group of 18-24 are going to college. This should go upto at least 30-40 per cent over next 5-7 years, if we have to take advantage of the demographic dividend everybody keeps talking about. If we don't do this posterity will not forgive us. China has 30 million of its young people in colleges, but we have just 14 million. So I wanted to be involved in a sector which can make the maximum amount of difference to this country's future. I came across Ramdas Pai in 1995. Infosys was building its first campus in Mangalore and we had leased a 7500 square feet office space. Unfortunately there was no power. We looked for a place to put up a generator for power supply and the neighboring empty land belonged to Manipal Foundation. Ramdas (Kamat, the current Infrastructure head at Infosys) knew Ramdas Pai and we went and met him. He immediately said please go ahead and use our land, if it will help generate jobs for the local economy and wanted no consideration in return. Can you believe it that for a decade we ran the Mangalore Infy campus on our own generators? For years Pai invited me to be on the board of Manipal University and because of my other commitments I kept postponing. But once I did accept, I pushed him to double capacity at Manipal Institute of Technology. Also Manipal is probably the only university town in India which can be compared to an Oxford or a Cambridge. Was impressed by the Manipal group founders vision towards education and healthcare sectors. Manipal has built a brand name for quality education. Want to leverage that and in the next 5 years if we can provide higher education to 1 lakh more people, at least we would have done something. I want to achieve scale in anything I do, so as to have a meaningful impact. For profit universities are not allowed in India. We will start 5 new universities with an investment of Rs 2000 crore with seed capital from Manipal University. The first in Jaipur will commence this year. The work I do here is my small contribution back to the society. However I do own a 1 per cent stake in the educational services company Manipal Universal Learning Pvt Ltd which is a commercial venture and I also advise on their expansion plans in the healthcare sector. Currently we have around 4400 beds which we want to increase to 12,000 beds on the next 4-5 years. What are your other plans? Ranjan and I are working towards setting up a $100 million fund which will invest in mid-stage start-ups. This will not be at seed funding stage but companies which are looking to scale. We will invest primarily in technology and healthcare companies. We don't want to invest in too many companies because we intend to provide more than money to those companies. We will be launching this fund very shortly.