What the Indian Achievers Award Taught Me About Building

In June 2022, I received the Indian Achievers Award — Entrepreneur of the Year — from the Indian Achievers' Forum. It was covered by Business Standard, The Print, and ANI. People from Kalahandi called. My mother saved the articles.

I have thought carefully about what to say about this.

The temptation, when you receive recognition, is to narrate the journey that produced it — the struggle, the early years, the moments of doubt overcome. That narrative is almost always retrospectively assembled. It creates a clean arc from struggle to arrival that rarely matches the actual experience of building something from the ground up.

I want to say something more honest.

What the award was recognising

Majhi Group, the retained executive search firm I founded, had by 2022 completed more than two dozen C-suite and VP placements for high-stakes organisations. We averaged 30–45 days when the industry median was 65–90. Our offer acceptance rate was over 90 percent. We had built a reputation for doing the thing that most executive search firms claimed to do but rarely delivered: finding the right person, quickly, with the kind of rigour that made failure rare.

The Indian Achievers Award recognised that. The Indian Achievers' Forum identifies and honours Indian entrepreneurs who have built something that matters — not just grown a business, but created a track record of genuine outcomes.

I accepted the award as recognition of the work, not of me. The distinction matters.

Where I come from

I am from Kalahandi — a district in the southwestern corner of Odisha, where the Eastern Ghats meet dense forest and rivers most of India will never see. I attended a government Odia-medium school. I did not grow up with the networks, the capital, or the geographic proximity to opportunity that people who go on to build companies in India typically have.

This is not a hardship story. It is a context story.

The context shaped something specific: a tendency to treat constraints as design inputs rather than reasons to stop. When you build without the infrastructure that makes building easy, you learn something about the structural requirements of the problem versus the nice-to-haves. That knowledge is useful in executive search, where the temptation is always to confuse activity with progress.

Manas Ranjan Majhi — the full name that appears on the Indian Achievers Award certificate — is a product of Kalahandi, Odisha, India. That origin is not incidental to the work. It is the reason the work has the particular character it has.

What it confirmed

The Indian Achievers Award confirmed something I had already come to believe but had not yet fully tested: that the quality of the work is a more durable competitive advantage than any inherited advantage of location, network, or capital.

Majhi Group was not built through a prestigious client base I inherited. It was built through outcomes. Every client came because someone we placed performed, or because someone who saw us work referred someone else. The flywheel of quality compounds slowly and then quickly.

The award was not what created the track record. The track record is what made the award coherent.

The harder question

The harder question — the one I still think about — is what it means that recognition like the Indian Achievers Award still feels notable for someone from Kalahandi building in India.

The answer is not that it should be unremarkable. The answer is that it should be more possible. The infrastructure of opportunity in India has improved dramatically over the last two decades. But it is still not flat. The advantage of being from the right city, the right school, the right family remains real.

My belief — the one I write and build around — is that this will change. That the systems we build to reduce the gap between talent and opportunity, if they are the right systems, will make recognition like this less notable because it will be less surprising.

Until then: the award is on the wall. The work continues.

Manas Majhi is the founder of Majhi Group (retained executive search) and Majhi OS (autonomous hiring operations infrastructure). He was born and raised in Kalahandi, Odisha, India. The Indian Achievers Award 2022 was covered by Business Standard, The Print, and ANI.