Celebrating India's entrepreneurial renaissance

October 21, 2011 will be a red letter day for us. A galaxy of India's best known entrepreneurs and CEOs will vie for the first Forbes India Leadership Awards that evening at The Trident in Mumbai.

We've instituted these distinctive annual awards to recognise transformational leadership across the entire entrepreneurial firmament, from start-ups, mid-sized firms to the more mature organisations of global scale.

We've also picked a few categories that reflect our magazine's charter: The most outstanding global champions, multinational CEOs, conscious capitalists, social entrepreneurs and women leaders. And then there are two more prestigious categories: Life-time achievement and the flagship award, The Forbes India Entrepreneur for the Year. You'll find a clear delineation of all the 11 categories that make up this year's awards on page 30.

For the past few months, a special projects team, led by Associate Editor Cuckoo Paul, in collaboration with our knowledge partner Grant Thornton, has been hard at work to first build a rigourous methodology — based on quantitative and qualitative data — and then carefully vet each nomination on our long-list to arrive at a final shortlist of five nominees in each category.

Last week, a distinguished panel of judges, led by KV Kamath, the non-executive chairman of ICICI Bank and Infosys, sat down to pick the winners in each category. I'm not about to reveal their names just yet. Over the course of the next month and a half, we’ll unveil our shortlist of nominees — and then, the stellar line-up of this year’s outstanding winners, plus all the exciting images and coverage from our big awards night.

Our attempt has been to look for two crucial variables: Scale and impact. Each of our worthy winners has achieved both, in their own distinctive way. These are also the best examples of entrepreneurial capitalism — an integral part of the Forbes DNA. Over the years, you can count on us to look for fresh contenders who exemplify this spirit and also set new benchmarks of performance.