Oil, water and a swim across

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When Mahesh Gupta decided to call it quits, he had a cushy job at IOC, he was 34, and had the future of two children to think of. What gave the decision an ominous ring was that no one in his family knew business; his father was a government servant.

“At the time, my father was against me going into business. I was deputy manager, technical services, at IOC. I had got two promotions already and I was moving fast up the ladder,” he reminisces.

But Gupta, a mechanical engineer from IIT Kanpur, had his reasons for taking a blind plunge. First of all, he’s separated from his family by a transferable job that places him in a different city every couple of years or so. “I began my career with IOC in 1978 and worked for 10 years in various cities, such as Delhi and Jaipur. My last posting was in Mumbai.”

It’s ‘prima facie’ a case of family taking precedence over career. “I never wanted to be in a transferable job. My family moved for a year to Mumbai but moved back to Delhi as my parents were getting old. They had to be looked after. For a year, I lived separately in Mumbai. I wanted to move back to Delhi where my family was at the time. So I decided to quit.”

So began a journey from oil to pure water. Kent RO Systems happened much later, by an accident of destiny. But his first love was oil. Straight from IIT, his next destination, in 1975, was the Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun, for a Masters in Petroleum Engineering. That, later, had taken him to Indian Oil Corporation and a decade of service there.

The long years at IOC had given him many ideas that he wanted to put into practice. His job in the technical services department involved travelling to different parts of the country. “I knew how to use and treat oils. I worked in oil conservation and that helps you learn to test oil on the spot.”

In 1988, he started SS Engineering Industries, with a seed capital all of Rs 20,000. The business sprouted out of his garage in Delhi’s South Extension.