Elaine Chao, US Secretary of Labor, presented the awards at a ceremony attended by 800 people at The Waldorf Astoria in New York, recently.

The 13 Indian Americans to win the 'Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business' award include Darshan Singh Bagga, Ram Tirumala, Ravilochan Pola, Gunjan Sinha, C N Madhusudan, Umesh Vaidyamath, Sandeep Gupta, Sanjeev Narula, Ashish Kalra, Virendra Patel, Al Limaye, Vivek Shah, and Sanjay Bose.

Hailed as the Asian American business community's most distinguished award programme, the Outstanding 50 is the largest, all-encompassing Asian American business award program in the nation.

It honours individuals with outstanding leadership, vision and accomplishment who have built a successful business or who have distinguished themselves within their community.

In addition to the Outstanding 50 award, the Pinnacle Award recognises an individual who has reached the top of his professional field.

The 2007 Pinnacle Award recipient is Nusrat Durrani, senior vice president and general manager, MTV World, a division of MTV created to launch new MTV-branded channels that serve emerging audiences in the United States.

A real estate tycoon in Long Island, New York, Bagga noted: "This land is the land of immigrants. With hard work, imagination and honesty you can go up."

He came to the United States 37 years ago as a nuclear safety engineer. He was a class one officer in India, when he found a few disturbing truths.

As an officer, he could become a lakhpati (a man with Rs 100,000) when he retires. "I thought, Why should I wait for that till I retire? I could make more than that in five, six years in America."

When he arrived in the US, he had $70 on him. He worked as an engineer for a few years before he started Darshan Singh Bagga, LLC, a real-estate investment and development company, in 1981.

He has taken on several development projects, including Bagga Tower, in which he built a nine-story apartment complex above an existing one-story shopping center while it was still in operation.

He is the pioneer sponsor of the NYC law for tax abatements (1997) for an extension above an existing building and he was the first person to receive such a tax abatement.

In May 2002, he took on another challenging project, the 100,000 square foot Bagga Plaza. The property had been abandoned for three years and is now one of the most lively shopping centers in Nassau County.

He is also the chair of a committee responsible for planning and developing the Long Island 9/11 Memorial at the State University of Farmingdale. The project, estimated to cost $7 million, will depend on money raised from the public.

He has received awards like the Hind Ratan (from the then Indian prime minister H D Deve Gowda), the Punjab Ratan, and others.

He credits his wife Lovlin Kaur for his success. They have two sons, Dr Simran Singh and Harpreet Singh, and a daughter, Heer Kaur, who is married to Amit Singh.

Another award winner, Sandeep Gupta, works at Deloitte & Touche in New York, and has over 14 years of experience serving the financial services industry.

He serves domestic and global clients and specialises in performing reviews of risk management, trading, and regulatory and operations areas.

Prior to his move to New York, he worked at Deloitte's offices in Toronto, Canada, and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and at an accounting firm in Mumbai.

He serves as the president of the Metro New York chapter of the National Asian American Society of Accountants, a chapter with nearly 500 members. Gupta is a CPA and a management accountant in the United Kingdom and a chartered accountant in India.

Text: George Joseph in New York Photographs: (Clockwise) Darshan Singh Bagga, Ram Tirumala, Ravilochan Pola, and Gunjan Sinha.

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