Ready to play a big role
Trident Industries, led by Rajinder Gupta is a very interesting and different success story.
At a time when most Indian businessmen, including many with a long family history in the business, believed that textiles was a ‘sunset’ industry, Gupta built Trident Group into one of the largest textile businesses in India, becoming the leader by far in home textiles and terry towels. While, like a lot of other businessmen, he used profits from textiles to invest in energy and paper, this was not at the cost of halting investment in textiles. Today with a turnover of more than Rs7,000 crore Trident not only dominates local markets in home textiles but is a leading exporter too. Amongst its customers are global household names like Walmart, IKEA, Target, Macy’s, and M&S, amongst many others.
While the 67-year-old Rajinder Gupta has stepped up to the role of Chairman Emeritus, he is by no means resting on his laurels. On the contrary, his ambition is to more than double the valuation of the group from a little under $2 billion today to over $5 billion by 2030!
Gupta also has not followed the beaten path of first making money and then stepping into philanthropy and government policy. But right from the beginning he has focussed on the human side of business. Today the group employs 17,500 people. But he has always insisted that industry has a higher calling: to generate livelihoods, dignity and progress. And this was long before ESG was accepted across industry. This is entirely in line with Business India’s credo, set out at our founding in 1978, (when, in India, business and profits were almost dirty words) that business can be a force of great social change, betterment and national development. Interestingly, Gupta, all along believed in not just interacting but playing an insider’s role in industry associations, educational institutions and government committees and bodies.
Business India has also long argued that labour-intensive industries, like textiles, are not sunset industries in India but can be, as Gupta has shown, sunrise industries for India. There are very few countries in the world, which must have a large population base, where one can economically run such industries. These would, apart from China, include Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. It is these countries that could be India’s competitors in spinning, dyeing and weaving. But unfortunately, our long-standing socialist policies (which even China long abandoned) ensured that it was impossible to run factories in India with very large labour forces. Shackled by such regulations, India lost its natural advantages in industries like textiles or light engineering, while successive governments focussed on a heavy industry first policy framework. The new Labour Code introduced last year by the Government, makes some tentative steps to liberalise, but it has passed the burden to the states to follow through, to really make large global-scale factories a reality.
It is not just in textiles, but other industries like shipbuilding, engineering and electronics too. In spite of a head start, with a relatively large industrial base and a large domestic market, we let not just China, but the ASEAN Tiger countries move ahead. But fortunately, since liberalisation in 1991, we have slowly, created the conditions to move rapidly ahead. Today, many of our industries have moved towards global scale, with strong balance sheets and great home markets. While we may be late, it is not impossible to close the gap and catch up, and at the same time focus on giving our people good housing, education, healthcare and social security.
There are several industry leaders now ready to play the larger role. Rajinder Gupta, with his Trident Group is one of them.