Professors don’t typically make for great businessmen, let alone tycoons. Desh Bandhu Gupta, the late founder of Indian pharmaceuticals giant Lupin, is an exception in that sense and many others. In business, DBG, as he was fondly called in pharma circles, took a public health lens in his first innings in 1970s by betting on medicines mainly focusing on TB, malaria and anaemia, the three portfolios that were national priorities and had government programmes around them.
That almost half a century later India still accounts for over a quarter of TB and anaemia—the largest share in the global burden of these diseases—and despite recording a drop in the incidence of malaria, the country has seen a huge surge in other mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, speaks something of how the country’s public health record has panned out since then, and how much of it remains an ‘unfinished agenda’.
The story of India’s pharmaceuticals industry, however, has taken a dramatically different route. Indian companies that accounted for less than 1% of world’s medicine supplies in 1975 (in fact prior to 1970, over 70% of India’s drug market was dominated by overseas multinationals), today command over a fifth of world’s supplies—the largest globally—earning a sobriquet of ‘pharmacy of the world’. DBG has been a strong pillar of that global pharmacy, albeit a little less sung in the mainstream press than his peers such as Parvinder Singh of Ranbaxy, Anji Reddy of Dr Reddy’s and Yusuf Hamied of Cipla.
(Dilip Shanghvi, the reticent founder of Sun Pharmaceuticals, the largest pharmaceuticals company in India, is younger, so is his company, and hence despite his meteoric rise cannot be strictly dubbed as DBG’s peer).
Made in India: The Story of Desh Bandhu Gupta, Lupin and Indian Pharma, a biography by Manish Sabharwal, co-founder of staffing firm TeamLease Services, and Sundeep Khanna, a business journalist, corrects that flaw in the business history of India by attempting to give DBG his rightful place in the galaxy of pharmaceutical industry’s founding fathers in the country.
The authors trace the life arc of DBG, from Rajgarh, a dusty village in Rajasthan where he spent his childhood in a large joint family of teachers which had limited means and limited ambitions, to a chemistry lecturer in Raj Rishi College Alwar, and BITS Pilani, to landing a job at Khandelwal Labs, May & Baker, where he learnt his organisational lessons for establishing Lupin in 1968 and taking that company to the heights of today after a roller-coaster ride.
Despite the immense struggle-ridden journey, DBG ends up making Lupin the world’s largest TB drug producer, contributing significantly to slashing the prices of drugs and mortality attributed to TB. That will remain one of his lasting legacies.
However, barring a few exceptions, public health seldom makes great business stories. And Lupin later in life rides the same epidemiological transition that Sun Pharma had rode. Post-1980s as India urbanised, and the disease profiles shifted from infectious to chronic, companies like Sun Pharmaceuticals built business models around long-term, specialist-driven therapies—turning this public health shift into a scalable business opportunity.
Simply told, patients suffering lifestyle diseases needed life-long medications in therapies such as diabetes, cardiology, psychiatry and neurology, which lends to predictable demand and a scalable business model. Lupin followed the same strategy, with remarkable success. Though unaddressed in the book, many pharma industry watchers wondered why Lupin, with its given expertise in TB (a disease primarily of lungs), didn’t logically extend its leadership to address asthma and other respiratory therapies, a route that Cipla took by offering inhalation delivery technologies and creating an early positioning among specialists.
Most importantly, in the narration DBG emerges as a likeable and relatable human being who cares for his large family, and his extended family, Lupin. Through most part of his life, he practised Vipassana and chanted its philosophy “sabka mangal ho” wishing well for everyone in every circumstance. For people who had deceived, and failed him, he often remarked “tera bhi bhala ho” (may you too do well). It is probably due to this deep wisdom that he, supported by his calm and level-headed wife Manju, successfully managed the tricky area of family affairs and succession, where many business families mess up.
Through his life, DBG to most, Desh to Manju, and Babuji to the young ones, ditches fate’s blows in health, business environment, organisation-building repeatedly to emerge if not unscathed, but wise. If there’s one essential takeaway from DBG’ s life, it would probably be: “failure is success, if you learn from it”. It is also probably due to this ingrained wisdom in the DNA of the company that despite its bumpy ride, as an institution it has proved alma mater to many a captain in the pharma industry, including Ramesh Juneja of Mankind Pharma, who built one of the fastest growing large pharma companies in India, and Sudarshan Jain, who ably led Abbott Healthcare in India through a transformative journey and emerged as a formidable bridge between sparring Indian pharma majors, and foreign multinationals.
With unprecedented access to family members, the authors have sincerely and meticulously detailed his life. They have broken many stories in a book that journalists should have broken in financial papers. Given how little has been documented of India’s pharmaceuticals story despite its phenomenal role on the global business stage, this information-packed account is a significant contribution to India’s business history.
Where the book falls short is in fleshing out the defining crises that would have offered the readers deep learning opportunities from a grand life. For instance, there are passing mentions of DBG suffering mental health issues, but the authors shy away from detailing it. Similarly, the parts where he resolves conflict between accomplished professional leader Kamal K Sharma and brother ABG (both of whom have been instrumental in the Lupin journey in different phases), or the alleged episode of price manipulation of Lupin Scrip by Ketan Parikh in the early 2000s, are summed up in a few lines, while a deep dive into these could have proven an instructive tale for targeted readers.
Also, though the tone of the narration is authoritative, it doesn’t indicate whose views and voices it is representing. Often many aspects of these stories have multiple versions, and indicating the sources (family, insider, rival) leaves the readers with a nuanced and informed understanding of the subject and his life. Finally, at times it seems the book is racing to cover too much information, but the read itself is not racy.
Despite these minor quibbles, the book remains a crucial addition to the business literature of India, for chronicling an untold tale of DBG and Lupin, both of whom/which bloomed a little late, but in their flowering left behind essential lessons for budding entrepreneurs, particularly in India. Or if we adopt the quote-peppered narration style of the book, one can sum up the journey of DBG as “Haar ke jitne wale ko baazigar kahte hain”.
Soma Das is the author of The Reluctant Billionaire and an adviser to agencies in the development sector
Made in India: The Story of Desh Bandhu Gupta, Lupin and Indian Pharma
Manish Sabharwal & Sundeep Khanna
Juggernaut
Pp 376, Rs 799