Pralhad P. Chhabria, iconic businessman and Chairman and founder of the city-based Finolex group of industries, the country’s leading cable maker and second-largest PVC resin manufacturer, breathed his last on Thursday. He was 86.
Family sources said Mr. Chhabria passed away at his residence following a brief illness.
Born in Karachi, his personal Odyssey had all the classical trappings of the ‘self-made man’ - whose fortunes are made through sheer dint of hard work and personal virtues like honesty and integrity. Incidentally, Mr. Chhabria, with characteristic modestly, repudiated the very label in his engrossing autobiography, There’s No Such Thing As a Self-Made Man, released in 2008.
He commenced his career at age 12, as a cleaning boy in a small cloth shop in Karachi for a monthly wage of Rs. 10.
A refugee from the terrors and bloodbath of the Partition, Mr. Chhabria along with his younger brother, Kishen, came to Pune in search of a livelihood. Working gruelling shifts for a moneylender and sending money to his widowed mother in Karachi, Mr. Chhabria and his younger brother became door-to-door peddlers of electrical supplies, setting up their first shop selling electrical cables in 1946.
From its humble beginnings, the brothers leapfrogged to set up a small-scale industrial unit in 1956 and named it Finolex Cables. In 1981, they established Finolex Industries. The 1990s saw Finolex diversify into Optic Fibre Cables and Copper Rods. Today, the Finolex group has morphed into a giant Rs. 10,000 crore conglomerate.
Finolex Plasson Ltd., an Indo-Israel joint venture was the first joint venture by an Indian company with Israel.
Bereft of formal education, he built a conglomerate that would put MBAs from Ivy League universities in the shade. It also left him with a lifelong commitment towards fostering quality education as embodied in his philanthropy which took shape as the Mukul Madhav Vidyalaya at Ratnagiri and the engineering institutions, the Finolex Academy of Management and Technology in Ratnagiri and the International Institute of Information Technology at Hinjewadi in Pune.
After three decades at the helm, Mr. Chhabria formally handed over the reins of the corporation to his son Prakash in August 2012 following which the Board appointed him ‘Chairman Emeritus’ of the company.
He is survived by his son and daughter Aruna and their families.
