Indian Business Leaders

Karsanbhai Patel, Chairman and managing director of Nirma Ltd
The round, bespectacled face, the great shining pate with a crescent-moon of hair on its fringe, and the simple white cotton shirt are typical of thousands of middle-class people who commute daily between their modest homes in the suburbs and their places or work in the city.
But this is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill blue collar worker. A closer look at his steely eyes and the determined set of his jaw will assure you that this is self-made man whose ambition is far from having run its course.
It is a long, hard road that Karsanbhai has trudged to get where he has. It was partly economic adversity that first turned his thoughts to a part-time entrepreneurship in 1968. He was a chemist with the Gujarat Minerals Development Corporation, and had to work in a dingly, ill-equipped laboratory in Ahmedabad. The work was dull and his salary of Rs.400/- was grossly insufficient to take care of all his expenses.
It was duri...