BATTLES IN THE BASEMENT

How DQ and its flagship 'Top 20' annual grew into a high-stakes listing that grew from negotiations, arguments and months of research captured in a dBASE database

- Prasanto K Roy

One of the early memories I have at Dataquest, then run, written, edited and designed in a basement in the publisher's South Delhi home, is of industry stalwarts battling it out in a basement.

I had just taken up my first real job, as Dataquest's assistant editor, convinced by then-editor Raju Chellam, that this would be my true calling (after spending two years freelancing as a tech journalist, following an unrelated physics degree from St Stephen's).

I'd jumped straight into the fire - Dataquest's flagship DQ Top 20 annual was two months away. It was the only compilation and listing of the top tech firms in India, and modelled after the Fortune 500.

Listings. How big a deal could it be? I was about to find out. 

With most tech firms not publicly-listed in those days, a lot of our work for Top 20 involved ranking based on revenue estimations and debates, arguments and negotiations on those figures with the founders and CEOs of those companies. A higher rank was important for them - and critical for some segments and competitors, NIIT and Aptech being a prominent example, or HP, Dell and IBM (long before Lenovo).