So I’m sitting in Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport waiting to board a flight to Mumbai, India. For the next week I’ll be in India’s largest city (pop: 12.5 million) and the neighbouring city of Pune with a contingent of about 70 Irish business people who are travelling as part of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition. Each year the 24 nominees for the competition, plus those nominated in prior years, head off on a “retreat” to network with their peers, and in the case of the nominees, be grilled by the judges.

Previous trips have gone to Haiti, the US, Brazil and China so with this trip to India the Irish entrepreneurs will have been exposed to the three of the four countries that make up the BRIC and which are expected to be the engines of global economic growth for the foreseeable future. Having never been to India before I’m excited at the prospect of visiting a country that has generated such wealth in recent times but is also home to unrelenting poverty. I’m sure a lot of my preconceptions will be blown away.

The trip includes formal conference sessions on doing business in India, field visits to see the work Unicef is doing to help young girls create their own cooperative enterprises, an overnight in an ashram (well the Vedanta Cultural Institute) and visits to Indian companies including the IT and outsourcing powerhouse Infosys. I’m looking forward to hearing from Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Ireland’s honorary consul in Bangalore and also founder of India’s largest bio-tech firm. And I’ll be hoping to get some free time to see Mumbai and witness phenomena like the Dabbawalas whose amazing network delivers hundreds of thousands of lunches every day from the suburbs to hungry office workers – at levels of efficiency and accuracy which would put most multinationals to shame.

As well as filing stories for the newspaper I hope to get the chance to post to the blog on at least a few occasions over the next week. See you on the other side.