Aditya Vikram Birla: a biography

Aditya Vikram Birla, grandson of the legendary G. D. Birla, was one of India's most outstanding industrialists. In 1969, at the height of the Licence Raj, he started a joint venture in Thailand which grew within a quarter-century to become the largest multinational empire set up by a resident Indian industrialist. At the time of his untimely death in October 1995, aged 51, Birla headed a business enterprise with a worldwide turnover of Rs. 15,000 crore. Spearheaded by Grasim, Hindalco, Indian Rayon, Indo-Gulf Fertilizers and companies in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Egypt, the Aditya Birla Group is a leader across a swathe of products: viscose staple fibre, palm oil, carbon black, aluminium and cement. Its recent forays into telecom, power and financial services have made the group one of Asia's most diversified.

In this authorized biography, Minhaz Merchant was granted exclusive access to archival material on the Birla family including correspondence between G.D. Birla and Aditya Birla. Based on extensive research and interviews with over fifty Birla family members, friends, senior executives and business competitors, Merchant draws a riveting profile of a man who put Indian business on the world map twenty-two years before economic liberalization was formally introduced by former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and former Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

The book paints a broad canvas: starting with Shiv Narayan Birla, Aditya's great-great-grandfather who founded the dynasty, it sweeps across the early years of Indian independence when Aditya was growing up in Calcutta and traces his emergence in the 1990s as the pre-eminent industrialist of his generation. Aditya Vikram Birla: A Biography is one of the most important and authoritative business biographies to emerge out of India and will serve as a record of both Aditya Birla's exceptional international business career and his family's contribution to India's industrial development in the twentieth century.