Business as Unusual

A small team of youngsters is making the world come to India for doing business.

- Vandana

MANY INDIANS STILL have fond memories of the PAL-Peugeot 309, though the car ran on Indian roads just for a brief time. Peugeot was one of the first multinational automobile companies to come to India after the liberalisation of the economy, but a bitter spat with its Indian partner, PAL Motors, and labour unrest ended its game in 1997. Now 20 years later, the French carmaker is back. And, the credit goes to Invest India, the government-backed investment promotion agency.

In January, Peugeot announced that it would start selling cars in India in 2020. While this news was splashed all across, few people knew about the hard work behind the scenes that brought the company back.

In September 2015, an article in the  Financial Times about Peugeot looking to expand to new markets caught the attention of the Invest India team. The company was looking at Morocco, Iran and China. Rothschild, the consulting firm advising Peugeot, had an Indian, Vikas Sehgal, working on it. The Invest India team contacted him, but he said it would be difficult to get the French back because of the bad experience in the previous stint. But the team got an opportunity to make a presentation in Paris. The presentation impressed Peugeot, and after several rounds of discussion, the investment fell in India’s lap.

The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Confederation of Indian Industry and the National Association of Software and Services Companies hold 51 per cent in Invest India, and the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion holds the rest. While the deals that it facilitates hog the headlines, the Invest India team prefers to remain behind the scenes. “We have kept it under the wraps, under the radar, because we wanted it to be a solid organisation which only speaks on results,” said Deepak Bagla, CEO of Invest India.