Temples of Modern India #4 : Dhiru Bhai Ambani & Reliance

[Chanakyaa]

Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani(Dhirubhai Ambani ) was born on 28 December 1932, at Chorwad, Junagadh (now the state of Gujarat, India) to Hirachand Gordhanbhai Ambani and Jamnaben in a Modh family of very moderate means.He was the second son of a school teacher.
Dhirubhai Ambani is said to have started his entrepreneurial career by selling "pakora" to pilgrims in Mount Girnar over the weekends. When he was 16 years old, he moved to Aden, Yemen. He worked with A. Besse & Co. for a salary of Rs.300. Two years later, A. Besse & Co. became the distributors for Shell products, and Dhirubhai was promoted to manage the company’s filling station at the port of Aden.
He was married to Kokilaben and had two sons, Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani and two daughters, Nina Kothari and Deepti Salgaocar.

In 1962, Dhirubhai returned to India and started the Reliance Commercial Corporation with a capital of Rs.15,000.00. The primary business of Reliance Commercial Corporation was to import polyester yarn and export spices.The first office of the Reliance Commercial Corporation was set up at the Narsinathan Street in Masjid Bunder. It was a 350 Sq. Ft. room with a telephone, one table and three chairs. Initially, they had two assistants to help them with their business. In 1965, Champaklal Damani and Dhirubhai Ambani ended their partnership and Dhirubhai started on his own. It is believed that both had different temperaments and a different take on how to conduct business. While Mr. Damani was a cautious trader and did not believe in building yarn inventories, Dhirubhai was a known risk taker and he considered that building inventories, anticipating a price rise, and making profits through that was good for growth.

During this period, Dhirubhai and his family used to stay in one bedroom apartment at the Jaihind Estate in Bhuleshwar, Mumbai. In 1968, he moved to an upmarket apartment at Altamount Road in South Mumbai. Ambani's net worth was estimated at about Rs.1 million by late 1960s.

Childhood Days

Dhirubhai was born at Chorwad, in the district of Junagarh in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Chorwad was then, as it is now, a small village about midway between the historic fort of Diu to the south and the fishing port of Porbandar to the north. Porbandar is the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi. (Incidentally, the Gandhis and the Ambanis come from the same stock or gotra, the trading community of Modh baniyas.).

Dhirubhai's father, Hirachand Govardhandas Ambani, earned little as the village schoolteacher. He was, however, a man of simple habits and lived a measured life. Dhirubhai's mother, Jamanaben, was a thrifty woman and knew how to stretch every paisa a long way. Long years of hardship had taught her to handle with great care whatever little money Hirabhai gave her every month on the pay day.

But even her thrifty ways often failed to pull her growing family through the month. On such occasions she had to borrow small amounts of money from neighbours. She did not hide such day-to-day stark realities from her children, for she did not want to give them a false start in life.

Overall, Hirachandbhai and Jamanaben lived a life of impoverished dignity with their two daughters and three sons--Trilochanaben, Ramnikbhai, Jasuben, Dhirubhai and Natubhai. (The Gujaratis customarily add ben or sister to all female names and bhai or brother to all male names.). Dhirubhai was the favourite child of both Hirachandbhai and Jamanaben despite his being an enfant terrible.

He was from his very babyhood days extremely demanding, robust of health and difficult to placate. As he grew up to boyhood, he became even more vigorous, unyielding and irrepressible. He possessed immense gusto and enormous energy and was always determined to do what he wanted to do in exactly the way he wanted it done, come hell or high water, as the phrase goes. But Hirachandbhai was a fond father and seldom, if ever, spoke harshly to his children, especially to his favourite one.

Dhirubhai was precocious and highly intelligent and also as highly impatient of the oppressive grinding mill of the school classroom. Formal education was not his forte, he realized very early in life. He was essentially an outdoors boy. When asked to chose a task at home, at school or at the boys' hostel, he always chose the most strenuous task that called for immense physical energy and stamina. Not that he was poor in doing his school lessons but just that he did not enjoy all the mugging up and learning by rote which school education required those days.

As his elder brother Ramnikbhai and he grew into boyhood, Jamanaben began exhorting them to help supplement their father's meager income. "Begin earning some money," she nagged them. That angered Dhirubhai. "Phadia, phadia su karo chho," he snapped at her, "paisa no to dhanglo karees." (Why do you keep screaming for money? I'll make heaps of money one day.). Just to show that that was not an empty boast, he once procured a tin of groundnut oil on credit from a local whole seller and sold the oil in retail sitting on the roadside, earning a profit of a few rupees that he gave to his mother. Next, he began setting up bhajia or onion and potato fries stalls at village fairs during weekends when his school was closed.


Off to Aden

Just after Dhirubhai was through his annual matriculation examination and even before the result was out, Hirachandbhai called him home to Chorwad. Hirachandbhai had been unwell for quite some time and had grown extremely weak and frail. "Dhiru, do you know why I have called you here?"

Hirachandbhai asked his son the very night he reached home. "Well, I'll tell you. You know I have been unwell for past several months. I cannot work any more. I know you want to study further but I can't afford that any more. I need you to earn for the family. I need your money. The family needs it. You must work now. Ramnikbhai has arranged a job for you in Aden. You go there."

Dhirubhai had really wanted to study for a bachelor's degree, but his ambition melted when he looked into the anxious eyes of his sick father. "I'll do as you say, Hirabhai," he said and the very next morning he left for Rajkot to get his passport. Those days Indians did not need a visa for entering Aden but there were rumours around that the no visa regime was about to change any day. So he needed to hurry up before the visa rules changed. In a few days he was in Bombay to board the ship to Aden. It was on board the ship that Dhirubhai learnt from Gujarati newspaper that he had passed his matriculation examination in second division.

On reaching Aden, Dhrubhai joined office on the very day of his arrival. It was a clerk's job with the A. Besse & Co., named after its French founder Antonin Besse. Those days Aden was the second busiest trading and oil bunkering port in the world after London handling over 6,300 ships and 1,500 dhows a year.

And, there in Aden, A. Besse & Co. was the largest transcontinental trading firm east of Suez. It was engaged in almost every branch of trading business-cargo booking, handling, shipping, forwarding, and wholesale merchandising. Besse acted as trading agents for a large number of European, American, African and Asian companies and dealt with all sorts of goods ranging from sugar, spices, food grains and textiles to office stationary, tools, machinery and petroleum products. Dhirubhai was first sent to the commodities trading section of the firm. Later, he was transferred to the section that handled petroleum products for the oil giant Shell.

"I learnt business at the Besse which was then the best trading firm this side of the Suez," he used to tell friends in later years. He was quick on the uptake. He learnt the ways of commodity trading, high seas purchase and sales, marketing and distribution, currency trading, and money management. During lunch break he roamed the souks and bazaars of Aden where traders from numerous different continents and countries bought and sold goods worth millions of pound sterling, the then global currency, during the day. He met traders from all parts of Europe, Africa, India, Japan and China. Aden was the biggest trading port of the times, a trading port where goods landed from all parts of the world and were dispatched to the farthest corners of different continents. Speculation in manufactured goods and commodities was rife all over the Aden bazaars.

Dhirubhai felt tempted to speculate but had no money for that and was still raw for such trading. To learn the tricks of the trade he offered to work free for a Gujarati trading firm. There he learnt accounting, book keeping, preparing shipping papers and documents, and dealing with banks and insurance companies., skills that would come handy when he launched himself into trading about a decade afterwards in Bombay. At the Besse office during the day he polished his skills in typing and Pitman shorthand, drafting commercial letters, and composing legal documents.

At the boarding house where he lived with another twenty-five or so young Gujarati clerks and office boys, he devoted long hours of the night mastering English grammar, essay writing, current affairs and a host of subjects that took his fancy from week to week. He was the first to snatch the English, Gujarati and Hindi daily papers and weeklies as soon as they arrived by the ship ever day. The Times of India, Blitz, Janmabhoomi and Navajeevan formed his favourite reading material. He also devoured all sorts of books, magazines and journals the passengers arriving from various European and Indian ports left in the ships and at the offices of various shipping agents.

"Of all the books I read so avidly those days one I remember most fondly are (Jawaharlal Nehru's) the "Glimpses of World History" and the "Discovery of India," he would recall long after his Aden days. "They were fat, big books but written in simple English and to me they opened a whole new world of adventure, of human wisdom and human folly. I began reading them not to learn of world history but to practice my English but once I opened their pages their breadth of vision had me in a thrall. I used to keep a dictionary by my side when reading these books and note down every new word I came across to increase my vocabulary. Later when I used to draft letters to ministers and senior officials during my early Bombay days, I used whole lot of quotations, phrases and impressive words from these two books."

He also gorged on dozens of books and magazine articles on psychology that became his favourite subject for a long time. "I learnt much from this class of my reading," he sometimes said, "I learnt how we humans and animals love to be loved more than anything else, how we are driven by desire to earn the love, affection and honour of those around us, what it is to be a leader, how to motivate those whom we want to attain great heights, how ideologies and interests clash and reconcile or cancel each other.

"More than anything else I learnt that nothing big can ever be achieved without money, influence and power and I also learnt that money, influence and power alone cannot achieve anything in life, big or small, without a certain soft, delicate, sensitive, understanding human touch in all one's deeds and words."

After he thought he had learnt the basics of commodities trading, Dhirubhai began speculating in high seas purchase and sales of all sorts of goods. He did not have enough money of his own for such speculative trading. So he borrowed as much as he could from friends and small Aden shopkeepers on terms nobody had ever offered them. "Profit we share and all loss will be mine" became his motto. During lunch break and after office hours he was always in the local bazaar, trading in one thing or the other.

Soon, those around him found that he had an uncanny knack for such speculative trading. He seldom lost money in any deal. "I think I had an animal instinct about such trading but there was a lot of reading and understanding of market trends behind that animal instinct of mine. I read every bit of paper I could lay my hands on about what was happening around the world, I listened carefully to every word uttered in the market, picked every bit of gossip in the shipping circles and pondered long through the night in the bed about the pros and cons of every deal I wanted to make."

Meantime, the Shell oil refinery and the first oil harbour came up in Aden in 1954, the year Dhirubhai returned home to Gujarat to marry Kokilaben. As expected, A. Besse & Co. became the agents for distribution of Shell refinery products. Dhirubhai had done well at the office during his first five years. Now he was sent on promotion to the oil filling station at the newly built harbour.

He liked the new job, though it was a lot more demanding than the desk job in the commodities section. Here he had to service the ships bunkering for diesel and lubricants. He enjoyed visiting the ships, making friends with sailors and the engine staff I heard from them first hand accounts of their voyages in different parts of the world of which he had until then read about only in books and magazines. And, here it was that he first began dreaming of one day building a refinery of his own.

"It was a crazy idea for a petrol pump attendant to want to build a refinery of his own, but that is the sort of crazy ideas I have been playing with all my life," Dhirubhai recalled at the time Reliance's 25-million ton oil refinery, the largest grassroots refinery in the world, went on stream in Jamnagar in 1999. "I have been able to build this refinery because I decided long years ago not to settle for anything else," he said, "I had heard a Yemeni proverb in Aden "la budd min Sana'a wa lau taal al-safr" (Sana'a is a 'must', however long the journey may take). I never forgot that saying."

By the late 1950s it became clear that the British rule in Aden would not last long in the face of growing Yemeni movement for independence supported by Gamal Abdel Nasser's revolutionary government from across the Suez. The large Indian community of Hindu and Parsee Gujaratis began preparing to move out of Aden. Some began returning home to India, while some chose to settle in Britain. Aden Indians those days were allowed to settle in Britain.

Where to go on leaving Aden was debated among the colony's settlers heatedly every day. Some of Dhirubhai's friends told him that he should migrate to London where, considering his talents, acumen and guts, he could find better opportunities of growth. At the port and on ships at Aden he often heard glowing accounts of post-war Britain and the promises of a life of much greater ease there than one could ever hope to find in India.

Dhirubhai weighed his options.. By now he had saved some money and was thinking of setting up some business of his own. Although Dhirubhai's father had died in 1952, he had in the meantime been blessed with his first son, Mukesh D. Ambani, in April, 1957. Kokilaben and Mukesh were back home in India.The choice of opening a shop somewhere in London was tempting but he felt India was calling him home.

Those were exciting years in India. The country was in the midst of implementing the second five-year Plan which promised to build big industries, raise new big dams across many rivers, lay new roads through the length and breadth of the country, boost agricultural production to new record levels and set up a huge network of food grains procurement centers.

Though by the end of 1958, the newspapers coming from India were painting a rather gloomy picture of the country's finances and foreign exchange reserves, there was also a new vigour and a new fervor in their reports of a new Rs 10,000-crore five-year Plan then under preparation. The Plan promised to open massive new opportunities for growth for the country's youth. Jawaharlal Nehru was daily exhorting the young to cast away their old ways and help build a new India. His words were stirring and roused the passions of every young Indian, especially of those living far away from the country.

Dhirubhai was now 26 years, full of youthful vigour and vitality, and filled with high hopes for himself and for the new India of Nehru's dreams. He just could not miss the excitement of being in India in such tumultuous times. He decided to return home, instead of going to London to live a life of ease there.

Early Years in Bombay

So, sometime towards the end of 1958 Dhirubhai landed at Bombay with little money in his pocket and absolutely no connections except a letter of introduction from a Gujarati shopkeeper in Aden to his son living in a Bombay chawl to let him share his room. Soon after arriving in Bombay Dhirubhai began exploring openings for some business within limits of his meager savings. He went to various places like Ahmedabad, Baroda, Junagarh, Rajkot and Jamnagar in Gujarat looking for opportunities. But he felt that with the small capital he had all that he could do in these places was to set up a grocery, cloth or a motor parts shop. A shop could give him a steady income but that was not what he was looking for. He was looking for quick growth, for constant excitement of trading, and for the hustle and bustle of a busy bazaar, as in Aden.

He came back to Bombay, settled himself, his wife and son in a two-room chawl and launched himself as a trader in spice setting up office under the name of Reliance Commercial Corporation. All that his office had was a table, two chairs, a writing pad, a pen, an inkpot, a pitcher for storing drinking water and a few glasses. The office had no phone but he could make and receive calls on the phone of a next-door doctor paying him a small amount for every such call. From the very first day Dhirubhai began making rounds of Bombay’s wholesale spice market and collecting quotations of various items for bulk purchase on immediate down payment terms..

A jobless young boy known to him appeared soon after as his odd job man. An aged Muslim mehtaji was brought in as a part time clerk-cum-letter writer-cum-accountant-cum-receptionist. From the very first day he began sending letters in Arabic to Dhirubhai’s old contacts in Aden and trading centers of the Gulf Emirates. The letters carried rates at which Dhirubhai offered to supply various commodities like spices, sugar, jaggery, betel nuts and such and similar other things.

Orders began trickling in after a few weeks, and were promptly fulfilled. Often goods were shipped even before payments arrived. Dhirubhai kept his margins low, volumes large and quality high. Those days most Bombay traders paid little attention to the quality of their commodities. There was a lot of adulteration and mixing of substandard material in bulk shipments. Foreign exporters often complained that goods shipped from India were all so often a much lower quality than promised. Dhirubhai offered to forego payments due him in case his supplies were found below standard. That built a great reputation for him among overseas exporters. Orders began growing.


Manure to the Gulf

Dhirubhai began enlarging his basket of commodities on offer. He offered to supply anything and everything required from India. Once an inquiry came from a Gulf trader for manure mixed topsoil for a sheik's lawn and rose garden. It was a large order and the price offered was high. But nobody before that had ever received or fulfilled such an order.

Dhirubhai's friends told him there was no way anybody could gather so much of manure mixed topsoil in Bombay and that too in such a short time as required. But that was the sort of challenge that always spurred Dhirubhai's nerves. Against advice of all friends, he offered to meet the order but asked the Gulf party for a bonus on top of the offered price which was conceded.

Dhirubhai gathered all jobless young men from his neighbouring chawls and asked them to fan out all around Bombay and buy all rotten dung heaps they found. A graduate in agriculture science was hired to oversee preparation of the topsoil, which was packed, transported to Bombay and shipped to the Gulf within the given time. "We made big money from that order, real big money," Dhirubhai said.

Finest Textile Mill

By January, 1967, Naroda factory began producing fine quality fabric, about 5,000 meters a day. Then it hit a roadblock. The fabric was fine and the prices offered were attractive. Yet nobody in the wholesale markets of Ahmedabad and Mumbai was ready to touch Reliance cloth. The wholesalers stonewalled Reliance at the instance of established big mill owners who hated to see an upstart trying to enter their exclusive club. They had many more knitting machines than Reliance. No wholesaler could afford to anger or annoy them. So they shunned all Reliance material. For four months bales of newly rolled out fabric kept piling up in the Reliance warehouse.

The big players in the market thought seeing no way he could beat them at the game, Dhirubhai would succumb, pack up and leave them in peace. However, Dhirubhai was not one to give up a fight once started. "We can't beat them but we can bypass them," he told his people, "Let us go directly to retailers. There is no way they can stop us from selling directly to the retailers." In the next few days Dhirubhai's staff fanned out all over the big cities, piling bales of Reliance fabric at the retailers' counters without asking for any receipt or advance payment, no, not even seeking a promise of payment in future.

In Mumbai, Dhirubhai himself did what he told others to do. He loaded the boot of his old, Austin car at his Altamount Road flat with bales of Reliance material and drove about the city the whole day long from retailer to retailer, hawking his own goods. "Who can sell my material better than myself I thought," said Dhirubhai, "If I can sell it, so can they, that is, my people on the road; if I can't, then can't either. So, I myself took to the road."

(Just across the road from where Dhirubhai lived, there was a young man of about the same age as he whose thoughts ran the same way. He also was facing a similar wholesalers' blockade as Dhirubhai. He was then living on Peddar Road and his name was Rajneesh, Acharya Rajneesh, the Osho of the later years. His predicament was no different from Dhirubhai's. Books wholesaler had stonewalled him as cloth wholesalers had Dhirubhai. Rajneesh also was loading his newly printed books in the boot of his baby Austin car and going about the city piling them at the books retailer counters on similar terms as Dhirubhai was offering to the retail cloth merchants.

Dhirubhai and Rajneesh's cars must have passed by each other many a times during those days but, as Dhirubhai said, "I had no time then for that sort of spiritual stuff. I was in a different universe and, anyway, I had more urgent work to do. But how happy it is to know that a mahapurush like Rajneesh was then facing a similar obstacle as I was and tackling the same way as I.")

On reaching a retailer's shop, Dhirubhai would place his visiting card on the counter and introduce himself thus, "My name is Dhirubhai Ambani. I am a sadakchhap (a man from the streets) but I want to be big one day. I want you to grow with me, though at the moment I have nothing big to offer you. My brothers, some friends and I have just set up a factory at Naroda. We make this knitted fabric there. The wholesalers are boycotting our material for fear of the big mill owners. I offer this material to you. I don't want any money. You sell it. If you make money by selling our material, give me whatever and whenever you want to. Now, will you not offer me a cup of tea before I go?"

No cloth merchant had ever in his life seen a young man get out of a car with a pile of bales of cloth on his shoulders and introduce himself like that. They had seen many smart, amiable, outgoing salesmen but never anybody so gutsy, so daring, so open and so frank as I. They were damn impressed but would be a little wary too. Many of them doubted my bona fides. They thought that I was bluffing them; that, may be I was trying to pass off stolen goods to them. On such occasions I would tell them to call up my office or factory and check my word for themselves."

The gambit worked and worked well. Reliance cut the wholesalers out of the deal, selling directly to retailers. In a few weeks ales began picking. No retailer had ever been offered such lavish terms. Slowly and steadily Reliance material began moving in the market without any promotion, publicity or advertising. In the meantime the family had named the Reliance fabric "Vimal" meaning "pure". Vimal also happened to be the name of the first born son of the eldest of the three Ambani brothers.

As Vimal sales picked and they made good money dealing in it, many retailers in different cities stopped selling other brands. "We'll sell only Vimal, Dhirubhai," they would tell him when he visited their shops. Slowly the "Only Vimal" slogan began to emerge, though it was still some years away from the phrase being adopted as the company motto for Reliance's exclusive "Only Vimal" showrooms.

As Reliance prospered, Dhirubhai kept ploughing profits back into Naroda, adding new machines and new in house facilities year after. The Reliance team also expanded. Most of the newcomers were young men from Aden. Others were Dhirubhai's school friends or relatives, or friends and relatives of his friends and relatives which made Reliance sort of a big, joint family.

While most were raw hands, as had been Dhirubhai's early colleagues, many newcomers on the team were drawn from established big textile and other mills and offices. They also soon became part of the Reliance flock as Dhirubhai fired them with his zeal, bonhomie and his indomitable spirit of conquering the world. Dhirubhai, his two brothers and their nephew, Rasikbhai Meswani, who had joined them during their yarn days, formed the core team.

"The four of them made a deadly combination," said one of the old hands from Naroda, "They were a very raw, very high voltage and a very high strung but a very low profile people. They worked hard like hell, talked like army generals in the midst of a battlefield, never bothered about creature comforts, took quick decisions, and acted so swift that by the time you said 'okay, I'll do it,' they had done it. There was never a chance of their rivals or competitors catching them napping because they just didn't nap or let anybody around and about them nap either."

"They were never content or satisfied with whatever, good, bad or better, had been done or attained yesterday or the day before. They only talked about what new or better things could be done the day, month or year next. With their feet firmly on the ground, they looked at the stars and were determined to grab them. That was the spirit they had.

And, the man who kept fuelling this spirit and energizing them and others down the line like an inexhaustible dynamo was Dhirubhai. His ambition was insatiable. He seemed to want to conquer not just the world but the entire universe. Very Early in his Naroda days, he began saying, "Whatever we do, we must be the best, the number one. I hate to be number two. I hate to be the next best. I must be the best." It is this spirit of his to be the best of all in everything that inspired his Naroda and Bombay team to raise Vimal to be the finest, best selling fashion fabric of its times.

Recalling how Dhirubhai fired the zeal of his young team members, an early Naroda groupie said, "Before going to Germany for training during early Naroda days, I went to meet Dhirubhai at the Dhobi Talao office. 'Do you know Tata and Birla?' he asked.

"Yes," I said, "I have heard of them, though I have never seen or met them."

Woh kaun log hain (Who are they)?" he asked.

"They are the two biggest industrialists in India," I replied, not knowing what he had in mind next.

"Well, you are going to Germany for training," he said, now somewhat sombre, "So all the while you are there, keep repeating to yourself that one day we have to be bigger than Tata and Birla. But we can be bigger than them only if we master our machines. Just don't limit yourself to handling the Liba machines. Go with an open mind. Keep your eyes open. Demand to see everything, look into everything, and learn everything. Make note of all that they are doing, planning, developing.

"They will not tell you all by themselves. You will need to ask them, needle them, and pester them. Unki jaan kha jaao (be after their life). What you learn will depend on what questions you ask. Don't be with them just the scheduled six hours of the day. Stay there in the mill 24 hours. If necessary, sleep there. Most important: make friends while you are there. We need to have friends everywhere, if we have to grow big."

"It was his talk like this that made us mad for success, mad to be the best, to be number one. We felt elevated. We had a physical sensation of being uplifted in the air. He was a tremendous leader, the sort who transforms his men from clay into steel. His was an all- consuming passion, an overarching ambition. And, of all his teammates, including his brothers, no one shared his passion more or comprehended his ambition better than his young nephew, Rasikbhai Meswani, who had joined him after passing out of school a few years before the Naroda factory was started. Apart from being his nephew, Rasikbhai was also Dhirubhai's great chum. "We knew each other's pulse, as they say in India," said Dhirubhai," We were on the same wavelength. I did not need to use words to communicate with him, nor he to me. We could see through each other's mind. At any time, he could guess, rather sense, what I wanted to be done, how and when. The best part of it was that he didn't just guess things, he also acted swiftly. I put him into marketing, especially, marketing of our import entitlement yarn, and he did miracles there."

Reliance grew at a fast pace. Within four or five years of starting production, the number of warp knitting machines rose to about 20 in addition to a dozen warping machines. One German Muller raising machine was installed to give the fabric a buff effect weight, and make it smooth and soft to touch. Nine texturising machines, two circular knitting machines, four weaving looms and one screen printing machine were added just within a year. By 1972-73, the number of weaving looms rose to 154 even as ever new knitting machines kept being added to the old ones. That year started an in-house design center, the best-equipped and the largest in India.

In 1975, a World Bank team visited 24 leading textile mills in India. The team estimated the Reliance mill to be the best in the country. "Judged in relation to developed country standards," said the team in its report to the Bank, "Only one mill, Reliance, could be described as excellent." A year letter, in 1976 started a major overhaul, upgradation and expansion of all plant operations.

Yet again, in 1980 the mill was expanded, renewed and renovated with installation of 148 Sulzer weaving machines, 16 Sourer weaving machines, a large men's wear processing house, 16 Scragg texturising machines (the first POY texturising machines in India), and a large worsted spinning Sulzer processing plant. Then, in 1983, Dhirubhai's second son, Anil Ambani, returned home after completing his MBA from the Wharton School, Pennsylvania, USA.

He joined Reliance as co-chief executive officer at Naroda just when yet another major expansion plan was in the final stages. He got involved in the new initiative from his very first day at Naroda, though the main task Dhirubhai had assigned to him at that time was marketing. Then, between 1984 and 1996, the entire face of the Naroda mill changed with installation of 280 totally computerized water jet looms, 72 Sulzer looms, 24 motif designing Jacquard looms, 48 Dornier looms, and numerous other buffing, raising, piling machines were installed. Naroda also had the first, most modern effluent treatment plant of the country as also a captive mw power plant.

Naroda now became the grandest composite mill in the country where spinning, texturising, dyeing, heat setting, designing, printing, knitting, weaving, that is, everything for converting raw yarn into finished bales of fabric ready for the retail shops was done at one site. And, Reliance was now making not only saris and suiting but also all sorts of highest quality material ranging from camel wool suits to world class furnishing fabrics.

Ambani's his great achievement was that he showed Indians what was possible. With no Oxford or Yale degree and no family capital, he achieved what the Elite "brown sahibs" of New Delhi could not: he built an ultramodern, profitable, global enterprise in India itself. What's more, he enlisted four million Indians, a generation weaned on nanny-state socialism, in an adventure in can-do capitalism, convincing them to load up on Reliance stock.

Still, Ambani seems destined to be remembered as a folk hero—an example of what a man from one of India's poor villages can accomplish with non-shrink ambition.