India's Online Shopping Spree

With the number of Internet users expected to triple by 2015, India's e-tail market is heating up once again

Photo-Illustration by Wes Duvall for TIME

India's Online Shopping Spree.

In 1999, Alok Mittal joined the thousands of Indian entrepreneurs scrambling to take part in the global dotcom boom. His Delhi-based business, JobsAhead, which launched as a two-man gig with $500,000 from friends and family, aimed to connect Indian employers with local job seekers. By 2004, Mittal had grown the business into a 150-employee shop that was sold to online-job-search giant Monster for $8.8 million. Mittal was one of the lucky ones. Practically every other Internet start-up in India went bust during the dotcom crash of 2000 as rich Western investors pulled their venture capital out of emerging markets to concentrate...

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