New Delhi, March 12 -- In the last year, I noticed a pattern in the stories that people were telling about their stock picks-and in bull markets, everyone has a story.

Most stories were about companies supplying either goods or services to a government or a quasi-government entity, maybe for highways, railways, power, defence or something of that kind. This was not surprising, as for the last few years, India's economy has been running on a single engine of government expenditure. So naturally a lot of the economic activity was in this area.

But I thought to myself, have people already forgotten that not so long ago, supplying to the government was considered a huge risk area? It has always been well known that the government pays the l...