But gradually at first and then all at once, things began to go wrong. Rajagopal rattled off the list: the global financial crisis in 2008; a subsequent slowdown in India’s growth; the ‘season of scams’; and finally the new ‘administrative paralysis’ that took hold in New Delhi, as a wave of anti-corruption investigations shocked the political and business class. ‘A lot of economic activity came to a standstill,’ he said. ‘The demand–supply gap vanished. All of us as entrepreneurs, we took pains to set up all of these projects, looking at this growth potential, which never happened.’
