Word: indianness
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Lost luggage. Frustrating delays. Bad food. It's hard to get excited about flying these days. Hard, that is, unless you've just boarded the Airbus A300 owned by former Indian Airlines engineer B.C. Gupta. Take, for example, the safety demonstration. After asking for a volunteer from the 120 or so kids crammed, some two to a seat, in the plane's economy-class cabin, flight attendant Ridhi Sehgal explains how the oxygen masks work. A plastic deck chair appears, and Sehgal helps the volunteer, a worried-looking boy of 7, up onto it so that the other passengers...
Which, as he knows, doesn't mean people can't dream. Born in a small village--"We were not even having a bus"--Gupta got the idea for his enterprise more than 20 years ago when neighbors begged him for tours after he landed his job at Indian Airlines. "The people from my village thought I was a very big man and could show them the aircraft," he says. "But due to security I could not." In 2003 he bought a 20-year-old Indian Airlines plane "that had met with a small ground incident," cut it up and reassembled...
Despite the idyllic surroundings, Happy Valley nearly closed four years ago. It faces the same challenges confronting the rest of the Indian tea industry--intense global competition, fickle consumer tastes and labor disputes that have occasionally turned violent. India produces more tea than any other country in the world except China, but after years of neglecting to invest in marketing or technology, India has seen its exports fall behind those of Sri Lanka, Kenya and China in the $7.5 billion global tea market...
Since 1998, when a glut of tea from low-cost producers caused prices and profits to plunge, Indian growers have struggled to pay the country's 1 million tea workers. Unpaid employees launched a wave of strikes, while some owners sold or simply abandoned their plantations. "Many tea plantations became totally unviable," says Shiv K. Saria of Soongachi Tea Industries, which owns five tea farms in northeastern India. Estates went bankrupt because they were selling at below-cost prices and banks wouldn't lend any more...
This year India's tea industry has finally begun fighting back. The central government has promised $1.16 billion over the next 15 years in loans and subsidies for new, more productive plantings. Copying the clever marketing of tea producers in Sri Lanka and Africa, Indian entrepreneurs have begun to build their own upscale brands. Some producers, meanwhile, are branching out into tea bars for the subcontinent's free-spending young professionals. India's tea producers may never recapture the glory days, but they'll need a new strategy to survive into the future...