In the early 1990s, a Gujarat-based businessman who ran a textile manufacturing unit was battling the erratic power supply in the state. The expenses and the irregular supply from the state electricity board were threatening his local textile business.
He bought two wind turbines simply to keep the factory running. But what was meant to be a private workaround to keep his looms spinning revealed an operational reality he did not consider earlier – generating clean power yielded far better economics than weaving fabric.
In 1995, he raised seed capital of $600,000 primarily from selling family property and laid the foundation of Suzlon Energy.
A farmer’s son who became an engineer by accident of ambition
Tanti was born on February 2, 1958, in Rajkot, Gujarat, to Ranchhodbhai and Rambhaben. Though primarily a farming family, they also dabbled in other businesses. He had three younger brothers, Vinod, Girish and Jitendra. Eventually, they also became partners in his companies.
His parents knew the value of formal schooling. Though they weren’t educated much, they left no stone unturned for their children. Tanti went on to study commerce and mechanical engineering.
He started in his father’s construction firm and soon after began the textile venture with his brothers, which eventually led to Suzlon.
How Suzlon expanded through technology and global acquisitions
A year into Suzlon’s life, Tanti got a break that wasn’t surely for the faint-hearted. He’d secured rights to sell turbines made by the German manufacturer Sudwind in India. However, before he landed his first order, Sudwind collapsed. Most young founders would have treated that as a dead end, but Tanti saw it as an opening. He bought the global rights to Sudwind’s machines, hired its engineers, and took over its R&D centre in Germany. In one move, a supplier’s bankruptcy became Suzlon’s first real technology base.
Within six years of incorporation, Suzlon was the dominant player in India’s wind industry. By 2003, the company had pushed into China and Europe and landed a 24-turbine contract in Minnesota. Its 2005 IPO was oversubscribed over 15 times.
By the end of 2007, Suzlon was Asia’s market leader in wind energy. They had projects across fourteen countries on five continents, and the market capitalisation had doubled in two years since listing on October 9, 2005.
Suzlon’s global expansion and the REpower acquisition
Two acquisitions defined this era, and both would matter enormously later, for very different reasons.
In 2006, Suzlon bought the Belgian gearbox maker Hansen Transmissions for around $567 million, giving it a grip on a critical piece of the wind-turbine supply chain.
Then came the deal that made Tanti a global name. In May 2007, after a five-month takeover fight with the French nuclear giant Areva, Suzlon won 87% controlling stake in the German turbine maker, REpower Systems.
Tanti was elected chairman of REpower’s board weeks later. The deal was worth roughly $1.8 billion, and over the following four years Suzlon kept buying in until it owned the company outright. It made Suzlon the world’s third-largest wind turbine supplier and one of the top five energy players.
Tanti was ambitious and did not hide it at all. He openly said that he believed Suzlon could rank among the world’s top three wind energy makers by 2010.
Interestingly, before the 2005 IPO, almost no one had heard his name in India. Two years later, he was known across three continents.
Why Suzlon entered a debt crisis
However, a plot twist awaited. A mix of Europe’s financial crisis, a slowdown in India’s wind power sector, and an over-leveraged balance sheet from rapid overseas expansion left Suzlon in serious trouble by 2012-13. The company ended up as India’s biggest defaulter on foreign currency convertible bond repayments. That was a sharp blow for a company once counted among the world’s top wind turbine manufacturers.
Orders were pouring in a year earlier but simply stopped as the global economy seized up. However, the debt obligations didn’t pause with them. By the early 2010s, Suzlon owed banks more than Rs 13,000 crore. Talks with bondholders for a four-month extension broke down, and Suzlon defaulted on $208 million worth of bond redemptions.
Suzlon’s debt restructuring and corporate debt resolution
In March 2013, a consortium of 19 banks led by the State Bank of India restructured about Rs 9,500 crore of Suzlon’s debt under a Corporate Debt Restructuring programme. It bought the company time, but the terms were unforgiving: Suzlon had to sell assets, raise fresh capital, and keep its net worth from falling below zero. Tanti rarely spoke publicly about how hard those years were on him personally, but when he did, the strain showed.
Tanti described a stretch of 36 months as “the most turbulent times that we have experienced” and explained, in essence, that whatever cash the business generated went first to the banks, then to vendors, and only what remained went toward salaries. His family’s holding company even tried monetising land at a Karnataka special economic zone specifically to meet the personal capital-infusion requirements the restructuring placed on the promoters.
Even so, he stayed defiantly optimistic. In 2016, he told Reuters he expected Suzlon to exit the restructuring programme by March 2017, declaring, “We will be the fastest company to come out of CDR.”
He was wrong about the timing, though. The company failed to pay $172 million in outstanding bond principal, and by 2019 it was once again edging toward India’s bankruptcy tribunal, carrying Rs 7,751 crore in net term debt and a loss of Rs 1,537 crore against revenue of Rs 4,978 crore. Lenders ultimately agreed to a 60% haircut on their loans.
SEBI order and questions over Suzlon’s accounting practices
There was another aspect that came to light much later. The company’s restructuring terms hinged on a single unforgiving rule: Suzlon’s net worth could not dip below zero. If it did, the whole arrangement would collapse.
The market regulator SEBI, in its investigation covering FY15 to FY20, brought to the fore significant discrepancies in the company’s books. According to SEBI, Suzlon Global Services’ asset base recorded significant asset expansion.
SEBI identified irregularities in the slump sale of its OMS, or the operation and maintenance business. The market regulator eventually imposed a total penalty of Rs 28.95 crore on Suzlon Energy.
Even so, the regulator accepted that no investors had actually been harmed by it, and by then Suzlon had gone on to become genuinely profitable in its own right.
How Suzlon rebuilt after selling Senvion
Somewhere in the middle of this decade-long slog, Suzlon quietly did something symbolically enormous: it sold its stake in Senvion, the company REpower had become, to the private equity firm Centerbridge Partners for 1 billion euros, unwinding the very acquisition that had triggered the crisis in the first place. The empire Tanti had built was smaller now, but it was solvent.
Suzlon’s turnaround after Tulsi Tanti’s death
Tanti died in October 2022, still chairman, still fighting for the company, with the worst of the crisis behind Suzlon. But the complete recovery was still a few years away. His brothers Vinod and Girish took over as chairman and vice chairman.
The turnaround they inherited actually took shape over the next few years. By 2024–2025, Suzlon had gone from flirting with bankruptcy to being net debt-free, with more than 20.8 GW of installed capacity across 17 countries and roughly 32% of India’s wind market. Borrowings had fallen to just Rs 277 crore by the second quarter of FY25, and the company posted a net profit of Rs 388 crore in the third quarter.
Suzlon Energy reported a 6% YoY decline in consolidated net profit to Rs 305 crore in Q1 FY27 from Rs 324 crore a year earlier, while revenue from operations rose 23% to Rs 3,819 crore from Rs 3,117 crore.
Tulsi Tanti’s legacy in India’s wind energy industry
Along the way, Tanti picked up honours that had little to do with the balance sheet. In 2009 he received the United Nations Environment Programme’s ‘Champions of the Earth’ award for entrepreneurial vision, and the Indian press took to calling him the ‘Wind Man of India.’
By most accounts, he maintained a simple life through all of it: vegetarian food, reading technical journals, travelling, and meeting people from different cultures. In 2006, he became one of the two richest energy entrepreneurs in the world, with Suzlon briefly becoming the largest wind power company on earth by market capitalisation. A year later, he was on Forbes’ list of “Billionaire Blowups”.
The fall was as dramatic as the rise, and Tanti spent his final years fighting to pull the company back. He did not live to see Suzlon reach solid ground. But his brothers, who had stood beside him since 1995, did. Today, Suzlon is debt-free and powers a third of India’s wind capacity.
Editorial Note: This profile is based on original reporting, including direct communication with Suzlon Energy. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, FinancialExpress.com corroborated this information with public records and third-party sources. This content is not sponsored, and FinancialExpress.com retains full editorial independence and final authority over all editorial decisions.