N Kumar recently demitted offi ce as head of the India panel of advisers of International Enterprise Singapore (IE), a trade body similar to India’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB). Kumar has been performing his role with distinction since 1991-92, when Barry Desker, who was the CEO of Trade Development Board (TDB), IE’s predecessor, came over and requested him to become Singapore’s Honorary Trade Representative in India. To start with, Kumar provided offi ce space at Chennai and helped TDB understand India and Indian business. TDB had similar offi ces in Delhi and Mumbai. By 1996, the activities of TDB in Chennai and the South expanded and hired full time employees. Subramaniam, Kumar’s assistant, was deputed to work for TDB fulltime from 1997 and moved to a new offi ce in Besant Nagar.
TDB grew and developed over the years and a great deal of investment came from Singapore into the South. In 2003, the strategy changed, and the Trade Development B oard became rechristened as IE, with its focus entirely o n investment promotion. There was even more activity, and IE moved to a larger offi ce on Mount Road.
It became a high growth office that helped all Singapore companies with what they needed to do in South India. As IE grew, Kumar recommended a panel of advisers and IE accepted the idea, bringing in such leaders as S Ramadorai of TCS, Ashok Soota of Mind Tree, Sunil Mittal, KV Kamath, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. MS Banga, Tarun Das, Vaishnav Puri and Mukesh Ambani.
Over the years, Kumar revelled in the process of institution building IE work involved. “It’s an exercise similar to my stint in CII but involves two countries,” he told Matrix. With successive Singapore Prime Ministers’ emphatic that India is crucial to Singapore’s plans (“Their clear strategy is to have one leg in China and an equally strong one in India, to create an Asian powerhouse, a force for the world to reckon with”), IE went from strength to strength and eventually hired its own personnel to do its various tasks in India.
That is what led Kumar to believe that it was time to leave the manning of IE operations here to its full time representatives. He has called it a day.