Leadership Talk with Mr. Ronnie Screwvala

The live session of Leadership talk with Mr. Ronnie Screwvala, an Indian entrepreneur and philanthropist, cofounder of UpGrad and founder and CEO of UTV Group (UTV Software Communications, Bloomberg UTV, and UTV Motion Pictures), was conducted on 17th April 2020. The session was organized by MHRD Innovation Cell. Faculty members and students of Manav Rachna University attended the session. The session was very much inspiring and motivational for the young students who aspire to choose entrepreneurship as career and establish their startups.

Rohinton Soli “Ronnie” Screwvala is an Indian entrepreneur and philanthropist who works for poor and help them to overcome poverty. His advice to students in current situation is to recalibrate themselves for next 1 to 1.5 years, since the uncertainty of COVID crisis is unprecedented. He advised them to reskill that will help them in post COVID crisis period. His message to students is that entrepreneurship is a good career option. He said that one gets more mature after encountering failures.

He started his entrepreneurial journey right after completing B.Com and he moved from Toothbrush company to media and then to education – it is because he believes that some things happen in the confluence of situation. He said that the depth of market in India is humongous and a lot of opportunities specially in non-glamorous sectors like health sector, agriculture sector, education, energy where lot of consolidations are required– it is the crying need where technology and management brain can make it happen. He feels for survival of educational institutions of India over next 10 years, there is a need of 40%-50%  institutions to go online.

At the end of the day, business and economics are the most important and it will flourish if we can produce in large volume, high quality and right price. In Industry 4.0, focus is IP. India cannot be merely a manufacturing processing house. In response to Dr. Abhay Jere’s concern that today’s faculty members of educational institution discourage online learning because they fear they will not remain relevant, Mr. Ronnie said that COVID crisis has driven them to go for online teaching as there was no other option. He feels education sector needs massive disruption on digital platform. However, he feels big opportunities will come from innovation and creativity as we create original products.