Ram Chandra Agarwal, who 21 years ago opened his first shop, all of 50 sq ft, today occupies 1.35 million sq ft of retail space.
Lakshaman Dass Mittal, chairman and owner of the Rs 3,000 crore (Rs 30 billion) Sonalika Group, started out by getting local blacksmiths to copy a Japanese rice thresher to make a wheat thresher.
Shantanu Prakash, the managing director of Educomp, saw education, his own and of others, as the way to rise above life in Rourkela, Orissa, where "no one had any money".
Ashish Dhawan, the head of CrysCapital, which has funded many success stories such as that of BPO evangelist Raman Roy, says those from humble backgrounds work harder. They do not enjoy the networking that you might expect if you studied at Cathedral School or Harvard.
"They never forget their beginnings. Money does not change them, though it may change the next generation. The concept of thrift runs in their blood. Earlier I used to attach a lot of importance to education. But I do a lot less of it today," says Dhawan.
When Dutta came to Mumbai at the age of 17, he joined a company that made pouches to package medicines on a salary of Rs 15 a day. He packed medicines, loaded them on trucks and was also the delivery boy. He wouldn't go home for weeks and slept in the factory.
Opportunity knocked in 1991, after two years of toil, when the company's owners wanted to sell it. By that time Dutta had accumulated Rs 16,000 through savings and Diwali bonuses. The cost of the pouch making machine was Rs 250,000. He offered to take charge of the company. As payment, he would give the owners all the profit after paying workers’ salaries and keeping Rs 5,000 for himself every month. In two years, he had settled the debt.
In 1994, he managed to get distributorship from Indal, which supplied the basic aluminium foil. The first printing unit was bought in 1997. Sometime later, Dutta noticed that Hindalco, which had acquired Indal, was losing interest in foils. That was the time to integrate backwards and start aluminium foil rolling.
The initial public offer of his company was floated last year, during which Dutta admits to an inability to sleep until he heard that the qualified institutional portion had been subscribed 52 times. The first television interview, preceded by frenzied smoking, made him a nervous wreck.
Today, Dutta betrays a touch of pride when he says that of his 700 employees, at least 450 are MBAs, engineers or chartered accountants. "Education only teaches you how to respect people," he says.
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