Harshvardhan Bhatkuly, Publisher-Editor, Business Goa, shares his thoughts at the Business Goa Awards
In deep veneration to my kuldevatas Shree Mahalakshmi and Shree Damodar I stand before you to welcome you to the 12th Edition of the Business Goa Awards. Business Goa the magazine was launched in July 2009 and we are on the cusp of completing 15 years next month.
The Business Goa Awards were first held in February 2012 in a different setting than what we are here today. It was at Tito’s and I remember it was a very windy evening. We started that day, honouring, felicitating and putting in focus Goa’s entrepreneurs, changemakers, industry captains; and it has been a long and fulfilling journey for us to be here today.
Today we have Business Goa as a magazine, and as a media entity have honoured more than 300 people over the past 12 years. The journey keeps on growing but we have certain bulwarks of our focus which are extremely strong. We are strong on quality, depth, the kind of work that somebody does in a domain; and we value that journey of an entrepreneur. We take all these things into consideration to come to a decision as to the awardees. In fact I would say our Goans value the validity of the awards, and the magazine which has been one of the success points of the journey of this media empire.
Couple of years ago, in 2022, I received a pretty good compliment by none other than the Chief Minister of our State, Dr Pramod Sawant. Dr Sawant said he was quite impressed with the Business Goa Awards and what he said really struck a chord with me. He said this is what the Government should do. Business Goa is doing the job of the government so I feel that is a kind of compliment for me. In retrospect I have felt that it was a pretty good one because we did not set out to do what the government should do but we ended up doing just that − patting the backs of Goa’s industry and entrepreneurial gamechangers.
The magazine has grown in a nay saying world which declared that print is dead, print is dying or print is fading away − we have held on, on our own and pretty strongly. In fact when the world was folding up all around us during the tough years of covid, we were the only magazine that came out in print, on newsstands with great support of our advertisers.
We have had advertisers whose businesses were at a standstill but they were advertising with us because they believed in the focus, the journey of the magazine.
I think that the advertisers who backed us during the last 15 years deserve a huge round of applause because, let’s face it you have to finally put your money where your mouth is and our advertisers have been doing that. I really am very grateful to them.
Tonight is a night where we are going to felicitate more entrepreneurs, changemakers and industry captains. Let us all celebrate their success and let us wish them all the best.
