New Delhi, Oct. 24 -- Har Prasad Nanda wasn't quite the poor partition refugee that many other Indian entrepreneurs of the era were. Escorts Agents, his first venture, which he started in 1944 with his brother in Lahore, was a successful agency business of representing Westinghouse products. Unlike millions of others, he moved to India in 1947 with two cars and a fair bit of cash.

But the business was gone, along with the networks, and he had to start all over again in a newly independent country reeling from the burden of millions of displaced people who had to be fed, clothed, and resettled.

With capital, technology and manufacturing capacity in short supply, it wasn't a fertile environment for a young entrepreneur barely 30 years old...