 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the first edition of our new initiative Pride of India. I'd like to acknowledge the presence of my colleague and the president of our company Mr. Sunil Kumar who is sitting here. This was his brainchild two years back born out of the ideas that we were trying to sort of think through during you know COVID induced lockdown as many of you know exchange for media really stands for we are now called EFORM by the way we changed our name and logo last year EFORM really stands about what's happening in the marketing advertising and the media business the sectors across this country and our endeavor over the last 20 years of our existence has been to engage with and look at the best marketing practices of practices of large brands and corporates across India the uni leavers the you know PNGs and marikos of the world auto companies of the world that's been our forte over the last 20 years and with this initiative called Pride of India our intent is to engage in a meaningful dialogue and also recognize brands which are which are really driving the next you know level of economic growth in this country pride of India is about homegrown brands as you can see it is about brands that are India made it is about brands that are as I said driving economic growth in the country a lot of surveys that are you know done by government or causing government bodies also talk about Indian homegrown companies being the future for this country and the economic growth that these companies drive also drives employment hugely because a large amount of or much larger amount of profit that these companies generate is reinvested back in the business to you know for future growth purposes as you will see tonight our intent is to recognize these homegrown brands and the beautiful part about this initiative this program that we put together is that this is really about companies corporate India that does not necessarily only live in the large metros Delhi or Bombay or Bangalore you will meet many of the winners who represent you know various parts of Bharat from Uttar Pradesh in the north from you know Tamil Nadu in the south to Kolkata in the east to various parts of Maharashtra so it's really exciting for us to have put together this initiative our intent is also to you know recognize brands or companies that have that are new relatively new which you know for lack of better terms we call D2C brands these days which is direct to consumer brands brands that are funded that are changing the paradigm of you know how companies are reaching out to customers which are not going through the you know so-called middlemen but directly talking to customers and creating a large customer base lot of such services lot of products are now being sold through direct to customer approach and you will see pride of India initiative being a mix of mid-sized companies as well as these D2C brand as you know the you know the top level of the pyramid in corporate India is you know run by large corporates which are represented by maybe a few dozen sectors but when you look at the middle of the pyramid which is our you know intent through pride of India the middle of pyramid really is about thousands and hundreds of thousands of companies which are based across you know hundreds of geographical locations the interesting part also is that the sectoral representation in this middle of the pyramid is huge you know unlike the you know top layer where the big boys are kind of represented by a few dozen sectors as I said the middle layer is about thousands or perhaps hundreds of sectors you will see sectors like you know garments I mentioned D2C you'll see sectors like real estate bath fittings food products you know it is it is a really wide list so really this is an exciting initiative for us and thank you for being part of this initiative as you know the time till evening will be spent in the in the conference the pride of India conference where we'll talk about you know various issues that are driving growth in the you know mid-size corporate India and then 430 onwards we have the award show I'd also like to thank and acknowledge the presence of Mr. LV Krishnan the CEO of time in India who are our knowledge partners and who also did a lot of groundwork with us to get this initiative going with them be with LV and his team we curated the first list of companies that you will see on stage tonight and also during the day while the conference is on so thank you LV for partnering with us for taking the initiative to do so thank you also to Ajit Varghese, Akshath the entire team at share chat for investing faith in this initiative for supporting this initiative in year one and our other partners there's Archduck and also the Hindustan times team I'd also like to acknowledge two people who been you know I mean our entire team has been involved but two people who primarily really driven this initiative Ankit who's here and Ankit came on board only three months back so for him it's been a kind of baptism by fire also Simran Savarwal who's been with us for good part of eight nine years now and she's based in Chennai and she's been you know truly instrumental in driving this initiative so thank you for all of you for being here with you I look forward to learning a lot through the day and also meeting some of the you know winners tonight thank you so much