A prominent face of the IT industry and former chairman of Nasscom, B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, who has been selected for the Padma Shri, said the award meant more amount of responsibility to shoulder for the industry.
Wearing his trademark calm demeanour, Mr. Reddy said he felt honoured and was delighted as well as elated for he is the only awardee this year in the trade and industry domain. Besides his association with Nasscom, the founder and Executive Chairman of Cyient Ltd a few months ago was appointed Honorary Consul of Germany in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Since 2012, he had been Chairman, Board of Governors of IIT-Hyderabad. He is also a Director on the Board of National Skill Development Corporation.
Never one to miss an opportunity to emphasise on the need for an ecosystem to support entrepreneurship, Mr. Reddy said going forward he intended to continue the focus on the areas of promoting entrepreneurship, incubators and angel investments. Indeed, the ecosystem has come a long way yet “there is a lot more room to grow,” he said, underscoring the need to work towards entrepreneurship getting more acceptance and the ability of society to tolerate failure of entrepreneurs increase.
In this context, he pointed to the Entrepreneur in Residence certificate T-Hub incubator, of which he is a part, issued to budding entrepreneurs when they fail to take their ideas to a commercial product level after the maximum 24 months available to them at the facility.
By way of a piece of advice for start-ups, he said going to the depth of idea and technology was important. “We are in a generation where technology is at its best and offers tremendous growth opportunity,” he said.
To whom would he like to dedicate the award? He said among the several distinctive entities are the 14,000 employees of Cyient and their relentless amount of work that helped a first-generation entrepreneur like him build a sustainable global technology company. Next, he added, comes his family that put up with lot of inconvenience.
