An investor’s journey from falling in love with India to making it home – Our Story
We are inching closer to a New Year. I hope all the 2020 shenanigans dissolve as it ends and we step into 2021.
I found myself becoming nostalgic about what it took to get to this place. And so, I penned down our journey as investors in India. By ‘our’ I mean my husband’s and mine.
Thinking about this journey is no less than a sunkissed feeling on a chilly morning.
2017 – Back to Germany
This was a landmark year in my life.
I had just returned from a 4-year stint in India to Germany.
I was beginning to settle back in when the company announced a fundamental restructuring of its Business Services. Back to square 1 – from a centralized global Business Services organization to functional silos.
As a consequence, most leaders of the old organizations left – among them me.
Having worked for the company for 30 years, emotionally, this came close to a separation for me. I went through the complete grief cycle. It took me about a year to heal my wounds and get over it.
I don’t blame myself for that.
If you go to work for 30 years for the same company, to the same buildings, with the same people it just hits you to let go of all of that.
2018 – Retreat to India
After this “trauma”, my husband and I took stock of our lives, looked at what we had achieved so far, and what life still held for us in the future. A few things emerged:
We were financially safe – enough to put a roof on our head and food to keep us warm
Our sons were independent - both having completed their education and leading their own lives
We wanted to do something together – but with sufficient space for each of us to independently express ourselves. We like to keep it that way
We had fallen in love with India, its people, its culture – everything
As we went through these points, the decision to come back to India was glass clear.
2016 - Prelude
The first Modi administration established a scheme that allowed foreign investors to obtain permanent residency based on a set of criteria.
2018 – Retreat to India (Contd.)
My husband had read about that.
We remembered this and started to explore deeper. Our first experience was sobering: the scheme had not made its way to the Indian embassy or consulates. Initially, nobody there knew what we were talking about.
Through persistent emails, calls, and using our network back in India, we finally found a few people who helped us take the first hurdle in the process which was to obtain a special business visa to come to India to establish our businesses.
We founded 3 companies and started building up our new footprint.
Many of you know that we are active in two fields:
StrengthMiner Consulting LLP through which I share my leadership experience with companies and individuals and
Kambre Agro Industries LLP, which is our regenerative farm, outside of Pune.
2019 – It’s all about finding the right partner
By this year we fulfilled all the criteria required to file the request for permanent residency.
Now, why is that important?
Well, as a small to medium scale investor, you need to be where your business is.
The founding personalities are a key success factor. To depend on timebound visas puts a high risk to your business. Therefore, this step was incredibly important to us.
In the summer of 2019, we chose Lexagent Services Pvt. Ltd., a well-established mobility provider in Pune, MH, to be our partner in the submission process.
With the help of Preeti Roongta and her knowledgeable team, including Ankush Jain and Darshan Chaude, we compiled and submitted our application – assuming we would have all of this sorted within 3 months.
Wishful thinking, that proved to be.
None of us had any idea of all the steps.
What we also did not know at the time, was that we were the very first investors to apply for permanent residency.
And much more important than that, we could not anticipate major political events, e.g. how much bandwidth of the administration the CAA would consume or how the pandemic would influence the availability of key resources – it was nowhere to be seen on the horizon.
2020 – We are permanent residents of India
To cut a long story short (In the end, it would take 13 months), we pulled a lot of levers before the permanent residency was finally granted in September 2020.
It was an exhausting experience. But at the end of it, we were all elated.
There were so many pieces of the puzzle that had to be put in place. With that being said, the role of the Lexagent team was one extremely important piece of that puzzle.
Their whole team mobilized all their relationships, the German mission in India supported us to find the right people in the MHA and the MCA, the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce helped us with legal advice.
We are grateful for every bit of support we received to progress the application and happy to be the first Permanent Residents under this scheme.
2021
One word – Hope.
