Samanth Subramanian

In Mint today, I write about Mundka, one of the largest plastic scrap markets in the world, and about Anant Vats, who had to wear shabbier clothes and stop shaving if he wanted to do business there.

Vats, who has an MBA degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, had been working for Infosys Technologies Ltd in Houston in late 2008 when he felt the urge “to do something green”. He quit his job and arrived at Mundka, a sprawling emporium of plastic detritus on the Delhi-Rohtak highway—and an industry so suspicious of “educated outsiders” that Vats still struggles to work within it. But the home-grown economics and the commercial ecosystem of Mundka have thrilled him no end. “I understood markets for the first time only when I came here,” Vats says. “This is a real market.”

More here.