‘Made in India’: A fine exposition of the personal and professional in creating pharma brand Lupin

Is there any major Indian industry without the dominance of the Tatas, Birlas, Ambanis, and other large legacy business houses? Think of IT and automobiles, and you run into TCS and Tata Motors. If it is finance, you have the Bajajs. Take any of the large industrial sectors and a prominent legacy business house will be listed in the Top Five. Except for pharmaceuticals, India’s remarkable industrial success story is based on home-grown entrepreneurs within the industry that have made it big in the last four decades. The Indian pharma industry is now a global powerhouse in the world of generics, the largest manufacturer of vaccines, the fifth largest net exporter of medicines, and is that rare Indian manufacturing sector that exports even more than the world’s factory – China.

Who are these Indian pharma entrepreneurs who succeeded in making India the “pharmacy of the world”, a popular tagline of the industry, and do we have books written on their trajectories? Memoirs or corporate biographies of the three pre-1947 pioneering firms were already published by the 1970s: The 1932 memoir of PC Ray, founder of India’s first large indigenous pharma firm, Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works in Kolkata in 1901; a book in 1939 by BD Amin, founding team member of Vadodara-based Alembic (estd. 1907); and a memoir in 1972 by Germany-educated Khwaja Hamied, founder of Cipla (estd. 1935). These books collectively spoke about the trials and tribulations of setting up pharma firms during British colonial rule and the high import dependency of the Indian pharma industry, which they grappled with.

After 1947, a second wave of pharma firms was founded in the 1950s–80s and some of them scaled up rapidly within a few decades to generate revenues exceeding a billion dollars and became major medicine exporters to the world. A few of them have been documented. There is a 2005 biography of Ranbaxy, then the largest Indian pharma firm, and a 2015 biography of Dilip Shanghvi, founder of India’s largest pharma firm today, Sun Pharma (estd. 1983). Cipla and Dr Reddy’s Laboratories are the only two Indian pharma firms that have set up systematic archives and both have regular print outreach (Anji Reddy’s memoir was published in 2015 and Amar Chitra Katha recently published The Cipla Story). Biocon (estd. 1978) has two books on its founder, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw; Torrent Pharma (estd. 1959) has a documentary film on its founder, UN Mehta, and Ahmedabad-based Zydus (estd. 1952) has a museum-like gallery at its headquarters and has also brought out commemorative monographs.

Building Lupin

Despite being in the same league of billion-dollar revenue firms as the above, the journey of Desh Bandhu Gupta (1938–2017) or DBG, founder of Lupin in 1968, somehow lay undocumented for all these years. Nearly a decade after his death, DBG’s and Lupin’s eventful trajectory has finally found a home in Made in India: The Story of Desh Bandhu Gupta, Lupin and Indian Pharma, written by entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal (also DBG’s son-in-law) and journalist Sundeep Khanna. Manish Sabharwal is now that rare author who has written a biography on both his father and father-in-law; Sundeep Khanna has now written on an introverted businessman and an extroverted one; and the book’s publisher, Juggernaut, now has in its stable a book damning the Indian pharma industry and a new book celebrating it.

There are over ten books in the market with Made in India as their title. This book takes its phraseology from the bestseller Made in Japan, on Akio Morita and Sony, an entrepreneur who inspired DBG. A pre-IPO ad in 1992 of Lupin, reproduced below, even compares Morita’s book cover with a fictional book cover with DBG on it, titled Made in India: The Lupin Story.

An actual book on DBG arrived three decades later and has a focus beyond the founder bringing in several actors beyond DBG and Lupin into the story to paint a vivid picture of the industry. Of the three journeys the book chronicles, the journey of DBG is the most fascinating. Born in the desert state of Rajasthan in 1938, DBG’s life appears to be a reflection of the lupin plant itself, extremely resilient and thriving in tough conditions. Physically handicapped at a young age because of falling into a pit outside his village with inadequate health facilities, he carried a life-long limp. The loss of his friend during childhood due to tuberculosis would not be forgotten. DBG’s Lupin would go on to become the world’s largest anti-TB drug manufacturer.

DBG struggled in his early career, quitting five jobs, two in pharma companies and three in teaching, before embarking on his entrepreneurial pursuit in 1968 in Mumbai. Marwari connections helped him early in the city of dreams and his siblings were also involved in the business. Moving on from government contracts for iron and folic acid tablets, he spotted an opportunity in anti-TB drugs and scaled up steadily over two decades. Spurred by the 1970 patent law amendment that replaced product patents with process patents, his research team reverse-engineered key molecules that formed the active pharmaceutical ingredients for anti-TB drugs. Manufacturing plants in Mandideep and Ankleshwar received US FDA regulatory approvals, a marker of high quality, before 1991 itself.

The 1990s ushered in a financial crisis for Lupin due to wasteful investments in the stock market, unsuccessful attempts at diversification, and an outdated business model that did not focus on chronic therapies. Further, DBG lost his father and brother in a tragic plane crash. From these ashes, a firm turnaround was engineered with greater portfolio diversification into chronic therapies, complex generics, biologics and biosimilars. Lupin entered the US later than other Indian competitors but entered aggressively and captured a significant part of the generics business. It also became an early Indian mover in Japan and steadily engaged with regions around the world. Smart acquisitions and some rather painful ones transformed it into a global multinational with over 20,000 employees, 15 factories and seven research centres. Just as with K Anji Reddy of Dr Reddy’s, who titled his memoir as The Unfinished Agenda, DBG could not live to see his dream of Lupin bringing New Chemical Entities to the market, the gold standard of research and development in the pharma industry. But from a starting capital of only Rs. 5,000 in 1968, he had managed to create a billion-dollar revenue firm.

With unparalleled access to DBG’s family and friends, this book unearths in detail minute aspects of his life. His love for ghee, his quirk of getting out of the car in a traffic jam and walking till his car picked him up again, and family vacations and team meetings in exotic locations. We learn about his voracious reading habits, sitting in the library of the famed UDCT (now ICT) in Matunga and his close relationship with UDCT’s star chemistry professor MM Sharma. On spirituality, DBG’s leanings moved from Vipassana to ISKCON, while the verses of the Bhagavat Gita kept him in close company all through his life. In the end, what emerges is a well-rounded picture of the life of a Marwari entrepreneur from a non-business family making it big in Mumbai.

The key players

Made in India, compared to most other Indian business books, refreshingly reveals the significant role played by the women of the family in shaping the business. DBG’s wife, Manju, who came from a business family, gave the starting capital for DBG to experiment with entrepreneurship, actively helped in the business in its early years and became Chairperson of Lupin after his death in 2017. Their four daughters have all gone on to excel in their fields: The eldest, Vinita, now heads the firm along with her brother Nilesh; Kavita was instrumental in the restructuring of the firm during the 1990s crisis and then left to create her own venture; and Anuja and Richa both became medical doctors.

Perhaps most satisfyingly, Made in India is not another business hagiography. It points out many strategic failures of the 1990s and the past decade, the frailties of the founder and Lupin’s quality-control issues linked with regulatory compliance. The book celebrates private entrepreneurship and, in doing so, it often overlooks the contributions of the government and the public sector. The patent law amendment of 1970, critical for the success of Lupin, is described as a “policy luck”; in reality, it was a gutsy act of industry policy by the Indira Gandhi-led government, supported by communists, that eventually spurred Indian capitalists. India’s public sector pharma factories and labs also played a crucial role in stimulating the Indian pharma industry in its nascent phase. Long before the private sector began its quest towards discovering New Chemical Entities in the 1990s, India’s public sector already had a few novel drugs brought to the market. The contribution of MNCs to the Indian pharma industry is also underplayed in the book; Hoechst and Ciba-Geigy, among the largest pharma firms in India until the late 1990s, are significant omissions in a book that covers most of the big pharma firms operating in India in DBG’s lifetime.

Overall, this book is a brilliant exposition of the personal and the professional in creating India’s globally successful pharmaceutical industry. The writing is crisp and lively, peppered with Sanskrit mantras and Urdu poetry. This is not a book that doctors would prescribe to cure your insomnia. For that, there are reliable and affordable medicines supplied by the Indian pharma industry.

Chinmay Tumbe is a faculty member of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, author of India Moving and The Age of Pandemics, and leads the India Pharma Archives project.

Made in India: The Story of Desh Bandhu Gupta, Lupin and Indian Pharma, Manish Sabharwal and Sundeep Khanna, Juggernaut.