Every
week, we are seeing people who made it big in their life and have been
inspiration to many others, with what they had in life. This week we
will talk about a person who had started his life from the level zero,
and made it really big. Prahlad Chhabria – Chairman of Finolex group of companies.
A real "Rags to riches" life story is what we all will say....
Read on ...
Read on ...
Early Days
Prahlad Chhabria is a self made man, but on contrary he has written his autobiography named "There's No Such Thing As a Self-Made Man"
Prahlad was born in 1930' in Karachi, Pakistan, in a merely middle classed family.
Despite being born in a traditional Shikarpuri Sindhi moneylender's community, his father's untimely death made his family poor.
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His father died when he was 12 years old, and he was forced to work at that tender age.
At
the age of 12, he started his career as a cleaner in a small cloth shop
at a salary of Rs10 per month, a year later when he was 13 Chhabria
served sherbet (Cool drink) to customers in a cloth store, living off
from leftovers in Sethji's kitchen.
A
year later, as a bill collector in Amritsar, while keeping accounts, he
taught himself to read and write. Armed with his year-long savings a
crisp Rs10 note he took the train back to Sindh, but was robbed by a
Pathan. The ticket collector asked the young prahlad,"How will we know
that the money is yours?" Chhabria had spent so much time admiring the
precious note that he had memorized its number, and the money was
retrieved from the culprit! His skill with figures got honed over time.
In
the year India gained independence, 17-year-old Prahlad P. Chhabria was
a domestic servant working 14-hour days for a Pune moneylender, sending
Rs30 a month to his widowed mother and nine siblings in Karachi,
Pakistan. Back then, he could barely read or write, but he was very
interested in learning new things in life.
Later
Chhabria and his younger brother and business partner Kishan moved to
Pune and learned their Engineering ropes. They started selling
electrical supplies all over Pune, which gained them the required
experience to open a retail shop. Soon they opened a retail shop.
The
differentiator was their ability to provide electrical services. By
taking appliances apart, the younger brother Kishan learnt to repair
them, moving on to laying electrical cables, even making his own line of
irons.
It
was this knowledge of fabrication that propelled them into the next
league, and they began to supply to the army. While Kishan became an
expert on manufacturing processes, Chhabria became well-versed in
applying for licences in Delhi. The brothers clinched their first big
contract for copper-braided cables, for Rs3 lakh, and bought a copper
braiding machine from Japan. Says Chhabria, "Today, without planning and
proper technology and processes, nobody could bumble along and set up a
new industry from scratch as we did." The new machine was installed in a
cowshed. Undaunted by the instruction manual in Kanji characters, they
relied on Kishan's reverse engineering ingenuity, and made a whopping
Rs1 lakh profit from the order.
Here comes the Birth of the Spark
They made PVC-insulated cable. Chhabria says "Our beautiful new cable was best described as "fine" and "flexible", which became "Finolex".
It describes us as well today as it did in 1958." Finolex is currently a
family and professionally managed conglomerate with more than 3,000
employees, with interests in telecom, power, petrochemicals and
agriculture.
Prahlad started his life as a door-to-door peddler of electrical supplies. Now, he is the founder of Rs3,000 crore company Finolex — India's leading cable maker and second largest PVC resin manufacture.
Not
only a multi millionaire by status, he also spent most of his income in
charity and human welfare. He wanted to give, what he couldn't afford
earlier: a decent education. Inspired by a lecture by
Vijay Bhatkar, architect of India's first supercomputer series, Chhabria
set up the non-profit, IIT, campus at Hinjewadi, Pune, in 2003. With
international tie-ups under its belt, it offers masters and PhD courses
in IT engineering to students, more than 40% of whom are from the rural
India. Transforming them into well-placed software engineers gives him
great satisfaction.
Till date, Chhabria and the Finolex Group have invested around Rs100 crore in their non-profit educational institutes.
Prahlad
adds, in the coming five years, at the behest of the Andhra Pradesh
government, Chhabria will set up a non-profit school and engineering
college on 50 acres near Tirupati; the Maharashtra government has
allocated him two vocational training colleges to modernize. Meanwhile,
he's building a non-profit Central Board English-medium school in
Ratnagiri, where 75% of the seats will be free.
Scientist
R.A. Mashelkar, president of Global Research Alliance, opines that
formal education and achievement have little correlation. The two great
innovators, scientists Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison, had no
education. He says, "P.P. Chhabria similarly belongs to a different
class of people, who were unadulterated by formal education! His
investments in this sector come from his fundamental belief that their
returns will not be to the Chhabria family but to the nation."
Chhabria's favorite lines remain "Those who are enlightened find the world illuminated"
This
seems like a fairy tale story isn't? This is not a fairy tale story.
This is a story of a real person with strong willpower who can always
find a way to overcome the obstacles in his path to success.
Under
prahlad's leadership, Finolex has become the No. 1 manufacturer of all
cables in India, second only to Reliance in the manufacture of PVC
resin. He has championed non-profit, high-quality education for the
masses by building multiple schools and colleges.
When
Chhabria is not pursuing his dream for Indian education, he savors time
with his grandchildren and his Sunday Indian vocal music lessons.
On his 78th birthday last March, he released his autobiography, "There's No Such Thing As a Self-Made Man". This is an inspiring and motivational book for all of us to read as it shows how hard work and integrity bring about success.
Hard Work, dedication, quality service and integrity have been key
factors that have given Chhabria an eminent place among the nation's
industrialists. He is the recipient of many prominent awards, here are a
few.
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