India - a rich nation despite poverty: Mallya

LONDON: India is an extremely rich nation endowed with a lot of natural resources and has huge potential, despite its millions of poor people, country's most flamboyant tycoon Vijay Mallya has said.
    
"The world has always looked at India as some sort of impoverished nation where people are starving. We do have our problems and...I am acutely aware of what the challenges India is facing. But that doesn't mean the whole of India is stuck in poverty," he told the Times Magazine.
    
"India is an extremely rich nation endowed with a lot of natural resources...why did Alexander the Great come to India? Why did the British show up? They came because India was hugely wealthy... It is a country with humungous potential," Mallya, who has built a four billion pounds empire on the back of Kingfisher beer and hopes to rule the skies with Kingfisher Airlines, said.
    
He proudly reels off the high disposable incomes and Western tastes of the new, young, educated Indian middle class.
    
Mallya, a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka, has lobbied hard for investment in local infrastructure.
    
He emphasised, "You can't grow a centre of excellence when you have power shortages and traffic jams."
    
Mallya has diversified interest from beer to aviation, and from fertiliser to Formula One, and he wants at the moment a successful international airline.
   
Last month, Kingfisher Airlines went international, with the first Bangalore-London flight.
    
India has the fastest-growing aviation market in the world, yet, according to Mallya, 70 per cent of it is controlled by foreign airlines. In the last three years, since Kingfisher Airlines launched, passenger numbers in India as a whole have grown from 14 million to a whopping 43 million.