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Educated
in life's school The educational qualifications of India's billionaires might be mixed, but their fortunes are not BS
Research Bureau Take the case of first generation entrepreneurs like media mogul Subhash Chandra, the soaps and detergents success story, Nirma's Karsanbhai Patel, or the chairman of Sun Pharmaceuticals, Dilip Shanghvi. Chandra had ambitions of being an engineer, but he had to drop out in class 12 from high school. He, however, found a teacher in his grandfather, Jaganath Goenka, who taught him the rules of business which led to the setting up of ventures ranging from packaging to satellite channels, amusement parks, multiplexes and online lottery ventures. Even Sun Pharmaceuticals' Shanghvi, a commerce graduate, had no formal education in pharmaceuticals. To overcome this disadvantage, he learnt about pharmacy by reading up. Of course, nothing helped better than on-the-job training. Being educated for the work that he was cut out to do is the story of K Anji Reddy, founder chairman of pharmaceuticals major Dr Reddy's Laboratories. After graduating in the technology of pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals from Mumbai University, Reddy went on to do his doctorate in chemical engineering from National Chemical Laboratories, Pune. Nirma's Karsanbhai Patel was a chemist who manufactured detergents at home in Ahmedabad since 1969. Soon the backyard developed into a soap factory and the rest is history. Sunil Bharti Mittal, 44, started out with a bicycle components manufacturing unit in 1976 before moving on to create a homegrown telecom venture. The Punjab University graduate's appetite for learning has not decreased. In 1999 he completed an Owner or President management programme at Harvard Business School. Azim Premji, the man behind the transformation of Wipro from a vegetable oil processing company to an infotech giant, is a graduate in electrical engineering from Stanford University in the US. In 1966, the 21-year-old Premji took on the mantle of leadership at Wipro. In 2000, he was conferred an honorary doctorate by the Manipal Academy of Higher Education in India. The second generation of business families have glittering B-school degrees to showcase. Take Kumar Mangalam Birla, 36, chairman of the Aditya Birla group, who is a chartered accountant and has also acquired a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from the London Business School. It's the same for Anil D Ambani, vice-chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited and his elder brother Mukesh, the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries. After the younger Ambani completed his Bachelor of Science from Mumbai University, he headed for the US to complete an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, an institution that would later honour, his father, the late Dhirubhai Ambani, with the dean's medal for setting an outstanding example in leadership. Mukesh, a chemical engineer from Mumbai University, acquired an MBA from Stanford University. Shiv Nadar, chairman, president and CEO of HCL Technologies, was a man ahead of his time. When HCL was formed in 1975, the country had just 250 computers. For the electrical engineer from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, to be placed in the same league as Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems) in Geoffrey James' book 'The Giant Killers' is an achievement that education cannot buy. Even school drop-out Gates would vouch for that.
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