On Monday, Indian entrepreneur V.G. Siddhartha asked his driver to bring him to a bridge close to the southern city of Mangaluru. Then, according to the driver, Siddhartha got out to take a walk. He was not seen again; his body was recovered on Wednesday morning.
In a typewritten note released by the news agency ANI, Siddhartha — founder of India’s largest chain of coffee shops, Cafe Coffee Day, and a prominent early investor in the successful IT services company Mindtree Ltd.
We don’t know for certain which partners Siddhartha had in mind, or why they were allegedly “forcing” him to buy back shares. We do know that the income tax department had been pushing him; with typically bad taste, the taxmen attempted to rebut Siddhartha’s accusation of harassment by saying that they were only “protecting the interest of revenue” by blocking the entrepreneur’s access to his Mindtree shares at a time when he desperately needed liquidity to reduce his debt.
It’s not necessary to have an opinion on all of Siddhartha’s transactions to recognize how fragile the position of any entrepreneur is in today’s India. A flood of private equity money from abroad may appear to have made entrepreneurship attractive. But many of these funds want to be treated like debt-holders, with a minimum guaranteed return.
And the problem runs much deeper than financing. In the India in which I grew up, you couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee. In fact, if you wanted to meet someone, there was literally nowhere to do it. Siddhartha solved both those problems: Cafe Coffee Day, in India, is a symbol of air-conditioned civility. Its 1,700 brightly lit stores are an accepting and globalized environment accessible to young people in even the smallest and most fly-bitten Indian towns.