Student Reflection by Adi Lankipalle (C’27 W’27, Hindi target)
With support from Huntsman Summer Funding, I spent my summer in Mumbai, India’s financial capital and its most cosmopolitan city. There’s a saying here: if you want to do karobar (business), you go to Mumbai. Every morning, the city felt like an economy in motion, accentuated by the smell of monsoon rain along Worli’s Sea Link, the sound of temple bells cutting through traffic, and the skyline of cranes and glass towers rising over street-corner chai and vada pav stalls. Over the past few months, it became my training ground to understand how the country grows.
At RPG Group, one of India’s leading conglomerates, I joined the Group Strategy Office. There,I worked on projects like market analysis, portfolio diversification, and new business incubation. Specifically, I worked on mapping emerging opportunities across sectors, analyzing industry structures, and evaluating how long-term investments can strengthen the Group’s ecosystem. It was the first time I saw how strategic capital allocation can serve as a financial decision and a mechanism to build entire verticals. Together, these projects showed me how growth at RPG comes from finding the exact points where what the market needs meets what the organization can deliver.
During the summer, I also had the amazing opportunity to visit CEAT’s Halol plant in Gujarat. I saw firsthand the staggering scale of raw rubber and steel cords turning into finished tires through hundreds of discrete operating procedures. The precision, discipline, and scale of that process captured India’s relentless industrial backbone, making the experience even more unique for my learning.
I sought this internship because I’ve always been drawn to understanding how India actually works from the inside out. As a Huntsman student, I study markets and policy; this summer, I wanted to see how those forces translate into action on the ground because even after spending much of my life in and around India, I’d never seen the country through the lens of its boardrooms and shop floors.
In a conversation with Anant Goenka (C’03, W’03), RPG’s Vice Chairman and a member of the Huntsman Advisory Board, he spoke about India’s coming decade with a conviction that stayed with me. He described how India is on the cusp of an era where ambition, capital, and capability are finally converging, and how leadership now means matching that national momentum with RPG’s institutional endeavors. His perspective reframed how I think about what it means to build in India, to innovate while staying grounded in values.
The Huntsman Summer Funding grant made it possible for me to experience this world fully, to sit in meetings where long-term bets were being debated, to walk factory floors where those bets materialize, and to see firsthand how systems thinking meets execution on Indian soil.
As I return to Penn, I carry with me a sharper sense of what development means in an emerging economy. Working at RPG offered a window into India’s operating logic, where scale is a function. Scale here is a multi-vector function of capital, trust, timing, and execution. Conglomerates uniquely coordinate capital, talent, and vision across sectors in a way that standalone firms cannot. Mumbai showed me how conglomerates become institutions, how these institutions become ecosystems, and how those ecosystems, in turn, shape the nation’s trajectory.
