The younger Mr. Sabharwal defended the private sector, which he argued was more effective than the government and the reason for America’s greater riches. He became convinced that he could have a bigger impact on India as an entrepreneur than by joining the civil service as his father had done.

Image Manish Sabharwal, the founder of TeamLease, which provides temporary employees across India. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

He wanted to start a business. But first, he said, he had to learn how a free-market economy worked. So, with his grandparents paying the tuition bill, he went to the Wharton School. “I wanted to go out and understand how business was done without regulatory connections,” he said.

At Wharton, professors and friends say, he worked with single-minded focus on a business plan — not for TeamLease, but for a private insurance company, India Life, which he hoped would take on the state monopoly. But back in India, policy makers were not yet willing to introduce competition in the insurance industry. He hit a brick wall.

Then one day an Indian manager at Siemens, the German company, complained to him about the tedium of processing payroll and benefits paperwork. Mr. Sabharwal decided to turn India Life into an outsourcing company to do that work.

In 2001, Hewitt, an American company, acquired India Life. A year later, Mr. Sabharwal and his partner, Ashok Reddy, started TeamLease to solve another frequent problem clients complained about: hiring and managing employees in the thicket of India’s complex labor laws.

Work in the New Economy

Today, one of TeamLease’s biggest clients is Whirlpool, the American appliance maker. In 1997, a few years after Whirlpool arrived in India, it hired hundreds of salesmen and sent them to independent retail stores to sell washing machines, refrigerators and air-conditioners to middle-class Indians who had never bought such appliances before. But soon executives were overwhelmed trying to keep abreast of changes in labor laws and various minimum-wage rules in India’s 28 states.

So Whirlpool began outsourcing its sales staff, which has since grown to 1,850 people — first to a staffing agency called Adecco and later to TeamLease. Excluding 250 people who work at the company’s own stores, most of its sales workers are employed by TeamLease, which handles their wages, commissions, health care and retirement savings.