Every day, the average American takes five pills made in India – of which one is made by the pharmaceuticals giant Lupin. This book traces three remarkable journeys: the rise of India’s pharma industry, the birth and evolution of Lupin and the extraordinary life of its founder, Desh Bandhu Gupta. Together, they illuminate how a country once completely dependent on imported medicines became the world’s pharmacy – and the role DBG played in that transformation.
DBG’s life was shaped early by adversity. As a child, he fractured his ankle; with no transportation available, his father carried him on his shoulders for three hours to the nearest hospital. But it was too late and DBG was left with a lifelong limp – and a deep resolve. Growing up without privilege or patronage, in a home without a toilet or electricity, he trained as a chemist, became a schoolteacher and then professor, and was even fired from BITS Pilani. He then worked in corporate India and, against considerable odds, took the unconventional leap into entrepreneurship. What distinguished the man was not flamboyance or bravado, but patience and discipline. During the Licence Raj, he spent weeks waiting outside bureaucrats’ offices, navigating an unforgiving state – while refusing shortcuts that compromised quality or ethics. From the outset, Lupin was built on an insistence that manufacturing standards and trust mattered more than speed or profits.
Today, Lupin is a multibillion-dollar enterprise whose medicines reach patients in over 120 countries, and its tuberculosis drugs are the most widely used in the world. But this is not a sanitized success story.Written with rare honesty by entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal and journalist Sundeep Khanna, this book confronts DBG’s failures – a decade-long financial crisis and expensive misjudgements – with the same dispassionate eye as it does his success in building one of the world’s biggest generics firms. This is a riveting portrait of entrepreneurship without mythmaking – of how institutions are built slowly, tested severely and rebuilt with resolve. It is the story of how one man built a successful company, gave wings to a world-class industry and became a business icon for a nation.
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