UK lifetime business award for Swraj Paul
Industrialist Swraj Paul, one of the richest Indians in the UK who set up his first companies in Birmingham in the 1960s, has been awarded for his lifetime contribution in the Midlands region, which is home to a large Indian diaspora.
Industrialist Swraj Paul, one of the richest Indians in the UK who set up his first companies in Birmingham in the 1960s, has been awarded for his lifetime contribution in the Midlands region, which is home to a large Indian diaspora.
Paul, 88, who is also a member of the House of Lords, received the ‘Lifetime Contribution-Midlands Business Awards 2019’ from Harj Sandher, founder of the awards, at an event in Leicester on Friday evening.
One of the previous recipients of the awards is Kumar Bhattacharyya, the celebrated engineer who founded the Warwick Manufacturing Group and advised the Tata group, among others, during his long career. He passed away earlier this month.
Paul recalled the entrepreneurial spirit of the Indian community in the region, and said: “I first began business in the Midlands nearly 50 years ago. It was then a very different place but there was a feature that I found particularly encouraging - it was a region of opportunity”.
“In the decades since then, we have had good times and difficult times. But that attribute remains an essential part of our commercial and social DNA and it is what sustains our economic environment; and we must nourish it”.
A large number of Indian-origin people moved to Leicester and the Midlands after being expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda in the early 1970s. They have since rejuvenated the region’s economy and culture to the point that Leicester is now seen as the ‘poster town’ of UK’s multicultural policies.
Paul said at the awards event: “The Midlands is perhaps the centre of this country’s multiculturalism. Over the years, one of the extraordinary features of this has been how different people have flourished in its social and economic ethos and yet retained their values and their cultural essence”.
“The things that we treasure, that we want to hand down to our children, inevitably go through some change. But they have not been lost and indeed have acquired a richness that is visible as you look around this room. When I first came to the Midlands, I never believed that this would be possible. To me, this is a better yardstick of success than any secular index”.
“It gives me some pride to see how well those of us who came from the Indian sub-continent have become involved with, learned from and contributed to the Midlands, particularly here in Leicester”, Paul said.
