In quick time they acquired the software skills to craft Zoho’s Next Big Thing, a software suite to run customer help desks called ZohoDesk that found customers like Tech Mahindra in India and Daimler and a division of the US Sears group abroad, in 2016.

The centre is just 2 kms from the famous Kasi Viswanath temple and the waterfalls at Courtallam. There are no airports nearby — Tuticorin is a three hour drive away, as is Thiruvananthapuram across the state border, in Kerala.

Such was the rush to join, that Zoho began construction of an additional 30,000 square feet facility next door to add space for another 200 engineers. Zoho quickly became the biggest employer in Tenkasi — bringing a fresh breath of technology, while tapping into the latent talent of what is otherwise a laidback rural and agricultural area.

When working in Tenkasi, Vembu embraces his roots, cycling to work, clad in chappals, shirt and mundu.

Thrilled with the results at Tenkasi, Vembu started a second rural centre in Renigunta, Andhra Pradesh, close to another temple town — Tirupati. Engineers at all centres combined resources to help craft Zoho’s latest avatar of its ZohoOffice suite — India’s first web-based, artificial intelligence-based office productivity solution.

Farsighted Move

This rural reach-out was to prove fortuitous: when the Covid lockdowns came, the main unit in Chennai could not function for many months, but the rural centres, being relatively infection-free, came back to near-normality, much earlier.

Sridhar Vembu continues to shun expansion into the usual suspects among India’s technology cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Gurugram and believes companies like Zoho have a duty to promote smaller centres. He tweets: “Can we limit growth of cities so we don't exhaust locally available natural resources like water?”.

He suggests another reason: “If you are talented and caught in that rat race, moving to a smaller community may cure it. You will simply stop caring about many of the ‘prestige traps’ that afflict our minds —what brands of clothes, shoes, phones, cars and so on and on. That is profoundly liberating!”

When informed that he had become the recipient of the Padma Shri, Vembu, characteristically shares credit in a tweet: “it is a huge honour and I feel humbled. I dedicate this to our employees, my extended family, for keeping the faith.”

He is hard at work today, organising the formal launch of Zoho's new product, a made-in-India messaging tool, Arattai, that could take on WhatsApp.

Better Late Than Never

In recognizing industrialists and business persons this year as part of the Padma awards, the government has belatedly remembered some veterans now in their 80s and 90s, whose contributions started decades ago. Padma awards also go to:

Rajni Bector, 80, who in 1978 started a small homemade food business in Ludhiana, with Rs 300, that went on to become a Rs 500 crore company, ‘Mrs Bectors Food Specialities’, with popular biscuit and bakery products like ‘Mrs Bector’s Cremica’ and ‘English Oven’. (Padma Shri)

Rajnikant Devidas Shroff, 87, the founder of United Phosphorus Ltd, a leader in agri-chemicals, who is known as India’s 'crop protection king'. (Padma Bhushan)

Jaswantiben Jamnadas Popat, 91, the only surviving member of the seven Gujarati homemakers, who began making the famous Lijjat Pappad in Mumbai and founded 'Shri Mahila Gruh Udyog Lijjat Papad' with Rs 80 as capital. Today Lijjat is the national market leader in pappads and the company is a Rs 1,000 crore entity and provides employment to nearly 50,000 women all over India. (Padma Shri)

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