Today I had the honour of adding the 4000th row to my spreadsheet of Globally eminent IIT Alumni (a nice proxy for modest engineers who also appear on lists like the Hurun list). Nadir Godrej, IIT Bombay batch of 1969-74 Chemical engineering. He never did finish his BTech – choosing to shift to MIT after the first year. He then did a masters in earth sciences from Stanford and has been part of the Godrej Group leadership thereafter. A lot more of a techie than his cousins – Adi Godrej and Jamshed Godrej – what he did have on his office wall was a freshly minted Feb 2025 Doctorate in chE from none other than ICT (UDCT in our times. It was a college I never managed to get into but we caught up with the UDCT alumni agreed to be part of the IIT Alumnj Council. We discussed his journey of alpha olefins and his experiences with fermentation technology (what else do ChE know anyway). I couldn’t understand why you need a Godrej Agrovet to grow strawberries but it seems had it not been for them, we wouldn’t have strawberries at a fifth of the cost of blueberries. We did strike a non tech ChE note on boating and discussed what it took to be Vishwa gurus in shipping. He was very aware of how Swiss and Italian yacht makers used workers from Kerala to make hand finished yacht interiors. And mentioned that his cousin had finally acquired a really long yacht.
As I look at my spreadsheet, I did a sum of column E. The total was USD 6.8 trillion over 4000 rows. This is supposedly the net worth from public sources of the individuals whose names populated my spreadsheet. These were not aliens from Mars. They were alumni of the college I went to. I had met the last row on the list just today. That is more than twice the market cap of the most valuable company in the world and more than the combined GDP of 150+ countries. It was also more than the GDP of India and way more than the market capitalisation of all companies listed on say BSE.
If there is one pool of capital that can take India across the chasm. This is it. What is even more serious is the fact that this is not dumb money. It is not passive money. In most cases it is not even inherited money. The IIT alumni movement is not just about nerds doing tech work – it is about the money that they can move around the world. As India struggles to raise USD 0.1 trillion in FDi, the 4000 rows on my spreadsheet are on hot standby – press the right buttons – and the 0.1 will become 1 in one year. I continue to wonder why FDI from a Gates or a Musk is important – or even relevant.