Sugar- Wishful Thinking

August 14, 1982 The entrepreneurs thrown up by the apparels export business have certain interesting characteristics. The business elite of this exporting community has acquired riches since the export boom of the early seventies. It has all the consumption and business tendencies of the new rich who have proliferated in recent decades. The uncertainty and risk in export business, especially in commodities such as garments, is very high. A single bad decision or improper implementation of an operation can make or mar the business. The business class that has surfaced through this is high risk-taking, dynamic, knowledgeable about international opportunities, and unscrupulous towards the niceties of regulations. Predictably, this attitude is reflected in the exporters' organisations. The AEPC battle, for instance, is being waged in the open. Not that other export promotion councils are different. In the Export Promotion Council for Finished Leather at Kan- pur, the managing committee has stopped functioning altogether owing to squabbles between groups, and the court and the government have intervened. In the apex body of exporters, too, viz, the Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO), the internal rifts in the managing committee are a subject of public debate. The lines of division here, interestingly, are between exporters dealing with the socialist bloc and others dealing with the Western countries.