Aditya Vikram Birla: The industrial titan who outran the Licence Raj

In the 1960s, the country was a fortress of the Licence Raj, a bureaucratic labyrinth where every tonne of steel produced or spindle turned required a nod from a somnolent clerk in New Delhi. While his peers were busy petitioning the government for the right to grow, Aditya Vikram Birla did something far more subversive. He decided that if the state would not permit expansion within its borders, he would have to redefine where those borders lay.

Born on 14 November 1943, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he attended St. Xavier's College, Aditya Birla was born into a wealthy family. But he treated his inheritance as a starting point for a journey that carried him beyond the shores of an insular market into the thick of global supply chains.

This was a radical departure from his contemporaries, who remained pinned to the domestic market, busy mastering the art of navigating the Indian system from within.

Between 1969 and 1977, Aditya Birla established a string of companies like Indo-Thai Synthetics and Pan Century Edible Oils, the latter becoming the world’s largest single-location palm oil refinery. By 1995, this offshore strategy had yielded a global revenue exceeding ₹8,000 crore, with assets surpassing ₹9,000 crore across 55 plants across India, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Egypt.

Often seen in impeccably tailored suits, he possessed a quiet, scholarly gravitas, though his interests spanned flying and painting. In his definitive biography of Birla, author Minhaz Merchant captures the essence of a man who managed to be both a “soft-spoken, sensitive individual” and a “hard-driving, visionary industrialist”.

This refinement was anchored by a fierce sense of national pride. At a press conference to announce the Birla-AT&T partnership, a reporter asked the American chief executive how a corporation with “strict ethical standards” could partner in India, a country supposedly notorious for poor business ethics. Birla snapped back with uncharacteristic edge, stating he took serious umbrage to such lazy stereotyping and asserting that Indian companies were as honest as any in the world.

This steeliness and business acumen were forged in the shadow of giants. He was the favourite grandson of Ghanshyam Das Birla, the patriarch who had supported and financed India’s freedom struggle and built the bedrock of Indian industry. While his father, Basant Kumar Birla, provided a steady hand in the family’s existing industries, it was G.D. Birla who loomed the largest.

Yet, in 1965, the young Aditya famously resisted his grandfather’s pressure to take over the family's burgeoning aluminium business. Instead, he insisted on striking out on his own to prove his worth away from the established safety of the Birla name. This streak of independence—the refusal to be just an heir—eventually led him to build a legacy that was entirely his own.

While Tata captured the digital frontier through Tata Consultancy Services and Reliance aggressively dominated consumer retail and telecom, the Birla group was anchored to the cyclical, capital-intensive world of commodities. Despite its massive scale, it found itself trailing in the race for market capitalization.

The last word on that, though, remains to be written. At its stage of evolution into a middle-income nation, India’s crying need is still manufacturing more than services.

When Birla died of cancer at the untimely age of 51 in 1995, India lost its first genuine multinationalist. His death left his 28-year-old son, Kumar Mangalam Birla, at the helm of a sprawling enterprise. Kumar Mangalam didn't just maintain this legacy; he weaponized his father's global-first DNA. The spirit of Aditya's 1969 Thai venture found its perfect resonance in his son’s audacious $6 billion acquisition of Novelis via Hindalco Industries Ltd in 2007.

Turning an Indian metal maker into the world’s largest aluminium rolling company and one of the largest producers of primary aluminium in the world was a thunderous vindication of Aditya Birla’s belief that the real limitation was never India's economy, but the failure of imagination to look beyond it.