Indian entrepreneurs and their stories

From rooftop to revolution: Lijjat Papad. It began in 1959 on the roof of a Mumbai chawl (a building of small single-room homes): seven homemakers, some borrowed tools, one recipe and Rs 80. They wanted a little extra income from making papads. No degrees, no investors, no grand plan: just grit and unity.

• There was no factory: each woman took dough home in the morning, rolled papads between housework, and brought them back by evening, on one condition: the quality must always be the same.
• They made it a cooperative: every member an equal owner, profits shared equally.
• In 1962 it was registered as Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad (lijjat means tasty in Gujarati). It added flour, masalas and soaps, began exporting, and crossed Rs 100 crore in turnover.
• By 2023 it had 83 branches, a turnover of Rs 1,600 crore and more than 45,000 women members, with buses to bring women to work and scholarships for members' children.

Lijjat did more than sell papads: it made thousands of women financially independent.

The man who changed hospitality: Mohan Singh Oberoi. Born in Punjab in 1898, he lost his father as a baby. He became a hotel desk clerk in Shimla on Rs 50 a month, but learned every part of the hotel, from serving guests to billing. In 1934 he mortgaged his wife's jewellery (borrowed against it) and put every rupee he had saved into buying a small hotel. A big risk, but he believed in it. He turned struggling hotels around and built one of India's largest hotel chains, started a hotel management school, and went worldwide. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2001 and died in 2002.

His story shows that entrepreneurship is more than a good idea: he trained skilled staff, managed money carefully, renovated and ran hotels efficiently, built a trusted brand, and always put customer satisfaction first.

India's traditional entrepreneurs: the Chettiars. Long before startups, communities passed on skills and trade across generations. The Nattukottai Chettiars of Tamil Nadu were traders, bankers and moneylenders in India, Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia and South-East Asia. They were known for trust-based lending and strong ethics, excellent accounts and records, and reinvesting profits in trade, temples, education and community welfare. Their wealth came from finance and from trading salt, textiles and rice, much of it before formal banks existed.

The Dandekar brothers. In 1931, Digambar and Govind Dandekar began selling ink powder in South Mumbai, using recycled bottles. Customers did not trust them at first, but they kept quality high and prices low. Seeing that Indian artists lacked good art materials, they went to Glasgow to learn the chemistry of colours, set up a laboratory, and grew into a well-known brand of pencils, crayons, geometry boxes and paints.