“When a bolt from the blue came from the Supreme Court, in the form of the unheard-of `50,000 -crore AGR penalty, the government gave a helping hand and quickly moved a Cabinet proposal to ensure the players in this industry survive,” said Mittal, who won the ET Business Leader of the Year award for a second time.
“The digital dream of India rests on a handful of companies, and I would urge you (finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman) on behalf of the entire (telecom) industry to continue to nourish and nurture it,” Mittal added.
He was addressing the gathering, which included Sitharaman, at the glittering ET Awards ceremony in Mumbai on Friday.
Bharti Enterprises is the holding company of Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telco.
“It’s a great honour to receive the ET Business Leader of the Year award, which was (earlier) given to me 18 years back (in 2005). But there are perhaps better ways to get it than to go through a crisis every time to come back here on the stage. And this time you’ve ensured I get it at the Jio centre,” quipped Mittal, taking a light-hearted dig at Airtel’s biggest telecom adversary, Reliance Jio.
The audience that hung on to every word broke into laughter. In a recent interview, he had told ET that Airtel had overcome existential crises in 2003 (intense competition), in 2020 (Supreme Court’s AGR verdict) as well as the tsunami of 2016 (Reliance Jio’s disruptive entry) to emerge as an institution that is today a national asset. Last October, Airtel became the nation’s first telecom company to launch 5G services.
The billionaire said his political family roots had stood him in good stead and prepared him and the global corporation he founded to cope with troubling times over the years.
“Getting trained in a political family, where almost everyday there are shifts and movements, is possibly a reason why we could come through multiple crises,” Mittal said.
Mittal said ET’s business leader prize was actually an award for Airtel, which represented a unique story — that in this country one could start as a young college grad with just `20,000 and go on to create a global powerhouse, the second-largest mobile company in the world.
He added that there has been a big shift in how India is seen across the globe since the government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in 2014, especially in the way the US leadership now looks and treats India.
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