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.

He devised an equipment, called Visgage, to test the viscosity of lubricating oils. ?With Visgage, you can test the quality of a large number of oil samples on the spot. Equipment available at the time could test oil samples only in laboratories.? So, testing a large number of samples took time and the results came still later.

Visgage was an answer to that. ?It tests and gauges the viscosity of oil on the spot. It is really useful to test the viscosity of lubricating oil in a generator, where you use l00 litres of oil.?

Now companies like Indian Oil Corporation, Hindustan Petroleum, Maruti and the Tata Motors use Visgage, but he had a hard time convincing people in the beginning. ?Then, I just employed an office boy. I had to go on my own to each company to convince people to try my product.? It was sheer struggle, but soon people started accepting his product. Visgage, which got a patent in 1991, was then priced at Rs 20,000, but now, with innovations, he sells it for Rs 14,000. ?In 1988-89, I had a turnover of Rs l lakh.? That was his first year of operation.

Later on, he made several oil testing kits and a hydrogage to measure water content in fuels and oils. Three years down the line, by 1992, he had 60 people working for him. Last year, that is 2007-08, he clocked a turnover of Rs 5 crore.

?I have offices all over the country. There is a sales person in every city. I have a factory in Noida that I bought in 1989.

All this happened rapidly over a period of five years.?

Then, destiny struck again. This time, as illness in the family. His two children, Varun and Surabhi, were laid down with jaundice. This unleashed another creative potential for him, and in 1998, he decided to get into water purification. ?Before my children caught jaundice, I never used a water purifier,? says Gupta.

At the time the best water purifier was using the ultraviolet method of purification. ?Then I found that the process of reverse osmosis was the best.? Gupta registered Kent RO Systems Ltd in 1998. ?I decided to first make one for myself. It was an adaptation of foreign makes, not much investment involved?bought components and assembled them. The one that I made cost Rs 20,000, whereas the UV model would cost Rs 5,000. As time progressed, we made many innovations in our factory. After two-and-a-half years, we came up with the current model of the RO system.?

Gupta had to hard sell the RO model to people who were only used to the UV model. ?We have a patent for the model in India. I applied for the patent in India in 2005, got it in 2007. I have also applied for patent protection under the PCT treaty, which allows patent protection in 150 countries.? He got actress Hema Malini to endorse Kent water purifier from 2005 onwards.

The size of the water purification market in India is about Rs 700 crore in the organised sector alone. Kent aims for 20% of the market share. Gupta has set up a new manufacturing plant in Roorkee, Uttaranchal, to meet the growing demand for water purifiers.

In 1998-99, Kent?s turnover was Rs 10 lakh. Last financial year, it clocked a turnover of over Rs 100 crore. ?In 2008-09, I hope to make a turnover of Rs 200 crore. In Kent, I employ 1,000 people,? he beams.

The company has signed a marketing tie-up with IOC to sell its products through its retail network. Gupta says his success mantra is: ?You have to dream and implement the dream. If you cannot dream, you cannot be successful.? He plans to expand exports, which is currently 1% of his turnover. He has started exporting to Kenya and the Middle East from last year.

Dream he did. And made it.