Sunday, December 14, 2025 | 01:35 PM ISTहिंदी में पढें
Business Standard
Notification Icon
userprofile IconSearch

Newsmaker: Meet Essel Group's Subhash Chandra, the restless media mogul

His journey from an 18-year-old who turned around family's food grain processing business to becoming head of an eclectic Rs 30,000 crore (pre-crisis) empire is now part of corporate legend in India

In January 2019, when ZEEL’s stock price went into a freefall on rumours of the crisis, Chandra wrote an open letter stating the problem, accepting responsibility for it and requesting for time to settle it. It calmed the markets.
premium

In January 2019, when ZEEL’s stock price went into a freefall on rumours of the crisis, Chandra wrote an open letter stating the problem, accepting responsibility for it and requesting for time to settle it. It calmed the markets.

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar
Even at 71, trust Subhash Chandra to shake things up.
 
Earlier this week the chairman of Essel Group wrote an open letter stating that he had settled 91.2 per cent of the estimated Rs 11,000 crore debt on the group’s books. And that he will, in a bit, settle the rest, too. He also talked, rather vaguely, about a digital venture that would not conflict with Zee Entertainment Enterprises (ZEEL), formerly a key firm in the group.
 
The struggle to get rid of the debt, piled on because of Chandra’s ambitious bets in infrastructure, has meant selling off