Pralhad P. Chhabria, chairman and founder of the Pune-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, Mr. Chhabria was in every way a self-made man. However, with characteristic modesty, Mr. Chhabria had repudiated the label in his autobiography, There’s No Such Thing As a Self-Made Man , released in 2008.
He began 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 days of 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.
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From their humble beginnings, the brothers eventually started 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 group has morphed into a Rs. 10,000-crore conglomerate.
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Mr. Chhabria is survived by his son, Prakash, his daughter Aruna, and their families.