Kapal Mehra: the man who aimed to be India’s polyester king but ended up with nothing

As a serious contender, he should have secured a place in corporate folklore. Instead, remarkably little is known about him today. After the swift collapse of his fortunes, it is almost as if Kapal Mehra was erased from memory.

His story begins, as many Indian business dynasties do, with a father. Orkay Silk Mills was founded in 1968 and soon grew into one of India’s fastest-growing textile firms.

In the 1970s, a young and ambitious Dhirubhai Ambani approached the elder Mehra for advice on setting up a dyeing unit. He was rebuffed with patrician disdain. Flexing his biceps, Mehra is said to have told him: “You need to mix blood with chemicals to make dyes. You can’t do it.”

Dhirubhai was not a man to take such an affront lightly. From that moment on Orkay was a marked company.

In 1981 came a breakthrough. Of 43 applicants seeking a licence to manufacture partially oriented yarn (POY), Orkay was one of just three to receive approval — the others being Reliance and JK Synthetics.

Though still smaller than its rivals, Mehra radiated confidence. Orkay, he declared, was a mini-Reliance that would soon become a maxi-Reliance.

In 1984, Mehra took Orkay public. The response was electric. The issue was oversubscribed at least fifteen times, and on Dalal Street the ₹10 share soared to ₹180.

For a fleeting moment, investors believed Mehra might indeed be the next big industrial force.

Then the Reliance juggernaut caught up.

In 1985, customs, excise and income tax authorities raided the company, alleging under-invoicing of polyester chip imports and tax evasion. Mehra challenged the proceedings in the Bombay High Court, which later pointed to serious procedural flaws in the adjudication.

But reputational damage rarely waits for legal clarity. The blow had landed.

Compounding matters, Mehra had taken a $12 million eurocurrency loan to import looms, repayable in Deutsche Marks. The sharp appreciation of the DM against the rupee — followed by rupee devaluation — ballooned Orkay’s debt. It was a costly miscalculation at the worst possible time.

During V.P. Singh’s tenure as finance minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government, Mehra spent 15 days in jail. By then, panic had set in. There was a run on Orkay’s fixed deposits, bank funding evaporated, and the company’s stock — once at ₹180 — crashed to around ₹35.

Mehra lost a significant portion of his personal wealth trying to prop up the collapsing scrip.

In 1998, the Bombay High Court appointed a provisional liquidator. Winding-up orders followed in 1999.

The last public trace of the family surfaced in a 2024 Delhi High Court filing, where Pankaj Mehra successfully challenged a long-pending penalty order dating back to the liquidation. It was a small and belated vindication — a quarter century too late to alter the arc of the story.

After liquidation, Kapal Mehra withdrew completely from public life.

The Saki Naka plant he once believed would rival Reliance’s petrochemical empire was later described by an investigator as a half-constructed shell. The south Bombay corporate office was sold to a paints company for about ₹14 crore.

It was a muted end to an entrepreneur who once dreamed of becoming India’s polyester king — and who, for a brief, incandescent moment, seemed almost within reach.