Sudip Dutta

Sudip Dutta,Ess Dee Aluminium

Sudip Dutta

CMD, Ess Dee Aluminium Age: 35
1989: Comes to Mumbai to earn a living and joins a pouch making company for Rs 15 a day
1990: Watches his first film in a theatre
1991: Persuades the owners of the foil company, who had lost interest, to sell it to him for deferred payments
Now: Owns 65 per cent of Ess Dee, whose name is the phonetic form of his initials and whose market capitalisation is Rs 1,413 crore (Rs 14.13 billion)

Meeting Sudip Dutta, the chairman and managing director of Ess Dee Aluminium, can be a surreal experience. Here he was, on a typically wet monsoon evening in Mumbai, sitting at a corner table in Copper Chimney, a restaurant that draws the reasonably well-heeled.

His Toyota Prado was parked outside, while a Mitsubishi Pajero, a Mercedes Benz and a fourth car he could not recall were at home. Clad in a tailored suit, he looked well groomed, and well fed. But when he spoke, it was of pantha bhat, which is the previous days fermented rice, flavoured with salt, chopped onions and pickles. It is something the poor in the eastern states survive on.

Sipping Chivas Regal, Dutta said: "Often, our family would have pantha bhat for breakfast, and we didnt know where the next meal would come from." That was 1988, in Durgapur. His father, a former army man, had just died.

Preparing for his higher secondary examinations, all Dutta knew was that Mumbai was the land of opportunity. Finally, the day the practical exams ended, Dutta bought the ticket. "I have everything now. But there is one thing I know. You can control everything but hunger. If you are hungry, you have to do something about it."

As India has gone through various phases of growing up - turbulent, traumatic, fascinating and full of opportunities - people have come from everywhere and nowhere to script success stories. Dutta is part of a small group that has risen above its middle or lower middle class moorings, without legacy or capital, many of them without enough education, to spawn modern, but as yet unsung, fairy tales.

When Dutta came to Mumbai at the age of 17, he joined a company that made pouches to package medicines on a salary of Rs 15 a day. He packed medicines, loaded them on trucks and was also the delivery boy. He wouldn't go home for weeks and slept in the factory.

Opportunity knocked in 1991, after two years of toil, when the company's owners wanted to sell it. By that time Dutta had accumulated Rs 16,000 through savings and Diwali bonuses. The cost of the pouch making machine was Rs 250,000. He offered to take charge of the company. As payment, he would give the owners all the profit after paying workers salaries and keeping Rs 5,000 for himself every month. In two years, he had settled the debt.

In 1994, he managed to get distributorship from Indal, which supplied the basic aluminium foil. The first printing unit was bought in 1997. Sometime later, Dutta noticed that Hindalco, which had acquired Indal, was losing interest in foils. That was the time to integrate backwards and start aluminium foil rolling.

The initial public offer of his company was floated last year, during which Dutta admits to an inability to sleep until he heard that the qualified institutional portion had been subscribed 52 times. The first television interview, preceded by frenzied smoking, made him a nervous wreck.

Today, Dutta betrays a touch of pride when he says that of his 700 employees, at least 450 are MBAs, engineers or chartered accountants. "Education only teaches you how to respect people," he says.

"If you give me a balance sheet, I will not be able to discuss the schedules, but will tell you what the problem with the company is"