Learn about synergy from Abha Thorat

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Abha Thorat is the COO of UK-India Business Council (UKIBC). She grew up in Mumbai watching her banker mother, Usha Thorat, storm the bastion of male domination, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

 

Only 30 years old, she reminisces, "One by being inspirational, by being a full time mother and a full time successful person banker, which was great. Both my parents had jobs, but they were parents beyond everything else. They gave us a lot of time, they developed their interests, they developed our own interests, they traveled with us everywhere, they believed in giving back to the environment, to our country, they are very patriotic and I think that really fed into my sister and my complete DNA. That is deep inside. Even when I am working here, I find I cannot do anything, which is not linked to India."

 

Even though Abha has studied to join the media, she soon found herself in Cambridge where she established the first international student's office. That is where her social awakening truly began.

 

She worked with government aid agencies looking at rural credit in Madhya Pradesh, but was not happy with the outcome and so moved to the city of London.

 

"I was a broker for four years and after four years of doing number crunching, I came to a point where I thought I needed to be looking at something much wider in the India space. The India story was taking off at that time, I knew I wanted to get back into it; I wanted to combine my culture media experience in Mumbai and my interest in that area with my interest in development. I still do not know how to put both of them together. There was a job in the Guardian, which is where most of the media jobs are advertised, looking for somebody to run an Indo-British Partnership Network saying it is a one-person organization and it is chaired by an interesting person, there were no details. I applied and was put through loads of interviews and I got the job and it was half my salary from the city as you would expect for a development role. They asked if I wanted to run it and I said yes".

 

With Karan Bilimoria running it, who is the chairman as well as head of Cobra Beer, he was her inspiration. She asked him whether it was okay to do what she was doing, dropping everything she had to come and do this? And he said, "You can only live once. When I ran Cobra, I had lived in the top of my house, ran my company out there and today I have this big amazing company. So you can believe in your dreams."

 

Her passion for developing deeper business links between India and the UK led her to join Karan Bilimoria's efforts to establish the UK-India Business Council. It is the first private sector -led-government backed business body and Chamber of Commerce that is working to enhance bilateral business relations between the two countries.

 

The UKIBC is a membership organisation that began with the million pound seed funding from the British Government. So what is next on the agenda?

 

She said, "We are looking at enterprise in a big way, so we have got this program called The Next Generation India Network, where we basically believe that young people from both countries can work together and create synergies and energies, which make beautiful things happen. So this network was conceptualized within the UKIBC with a small bunch of us where we felt that we have to bring together the young people in the two countries and create a network of people working on an India desk. So while financial services are not opened up, the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) is still the place where a lot of Indian companies come and look for equity. So there a way in which you can bring the people who are actually doing the deals working with people over here together."

 

"The other thing they are looking in a huge way at are creative industries because there is a lot of work happening. The Times has bought the Virgin radio station recently as well as a number of other smaller deals; there is a post-production company called Prime Focus, which again is an India-owned company in the UK. So Indian media companies are going global and they have lots of global ambitions. We really believe that is one of the area we are going to encourage because the creative industries in the UK accounts for large percent of their GDP and we think there is a lot of synergy to be had between the two countries."

 

Now Abha is taking the synergy forward with new projects. Coming up is a project with Jaipur Virasat Foundation run by the founder of the retail clothes chain Anokhi, Faith Singh. Their mission is to launch Jaipur as an equal tourism destination and that is not all. Through Beej, a dance school, Abha is hoping to take the art of Bharat Natyam to new audiences.

 

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