Courage, Crisis, and Creation: The Desh Bandhu Gupta Story

• What surprised you most while researching Desh Bandhu Gupta’s journey, the entrepreneur, the institution-builder, or the individual?

I’d say the biggest surprise is how misfortune can lead to fortune. It is unlikely that DBG would have become an entrepreneur if he had not been fired from his job as a Professor at BITs Pilani. This was his third teaching job and he was tired of bureaucracy so he took and passed an Indian Air Force exam but was disqualified because of his limp. When he returned to Pilani, the BITs administration told him the fine print in his employment letter required permission for exams he hadn’t taken so he should resign be fired. He said he didn’t need anybody’s permission to serve the nation and wouldn’t resign. They fired him. Lupin should probably endow a chair professorship at BITs for firing him. Also, DBG’s best friend in school died of TB. DBG had a lifelong limp and hearing issues because his father could not afford quality healthcare. After doing the research for this book, I find it hard to believe that it is a complete coincidence that DBG ended up making medicine, and why Lupin became the largest maker of TB drugs in the world.

• This book traces the rise of India as the “world’s pharmacy.” Are we at the beginning of that story, or somewhere in the middle?

No economist predicted that a country ranked 128th in per-capita GDP would make 60% of the world’s medicines, save consumers $ 2 trillion just in the last 10 years, operate a third of FDA-authorised medicine-making factories, and sell in 200 countries. The 80% reduction in AIDs and TB would not have happened without Cipla’s antiretrovirals and Lupin’s Rifampicin. Becoming the world’s pharmacy involved manufacturing capabilities and market share often associate with China; Americans ate 400 billion pills last year of which 200 billion were Made in India. Unlike India’s software industry which has exports 90% of its revenues, our pharma industry sells an equal amount of medicines ($30 billion) in India as it exports. So I’d say the story is just beginning.

• Desh Bandhu Gupta built Lupin Limited in an era of heavy regulation and limited capital. Would such a journey be harder or easier in today’s India?

DBG built Lupin in era that was hostile to entrepreneurship; there is no question that such a journey would be much easier today because of a thriving venture capital industry with over 200 firms, multiple role models of people who have not built companies based on regulatory arbitrage or connections, a much higher credit to GDP ratio with competition amongst banks to lend, the global acceptance of India’s brand, and much else. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru told JRD Tata that he hated the word profit. But the license raj became worse after Pandit Nehru passed. Despite that, in 1968, two entrepreneurs started TCS and Lupin. It was the same year Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal wrote Asian Drama, a 2200-page tome that defended India’s five-year plans, supported industrial licensing, and advocated capital allocation based on input-output tables created by PhDs. India’s mass democracy has not created mass prosperity due to those flawed economic policies but India has changed.

• You write without mythmaking. Why was it important to show the failures and financial crises alongside the success?

There is an old saying that judgement comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgement. Entrepreneurship is the art of staying alive long enough to get lucky because founding and growing a company is similar to how science progresses; hypothesis testing. You can’t prove something right, you have to prove it wrong. DBG’s destination was reached by a long and difficult path that involved regulatory mishaps, financial emergencies and product dead ends. But each failure made him stronger for the next game. Failure only matter if it is fatal; only if you are not able to stay alive to play the next round. Books that smoothen over personal flaws, tragedies or poor choices don’t do justice to success because success that is earned is so more valuable than something that is inherited. And anything earned is built on challenges.

• How did Manju Gupta’s role reshape your understanding of entrepreneurship as a shared, not solitary, journey?

DBG came from a family of teachers; Manju from a business family. But to quote from the book “Embedded in Hindu scriptures – the Vedas and shastras – is the concept of ardhangini: completeness through equal halves of man and woman. It is important to remember that the story of Lupin is the joint life of DBG and Manju building a company, a home and a family together. When she got off that bus in the early years of Lupin and saw her daughters in the gutter picking up bus tickets, she chose to recede into the background professionally. But she walked with DBG shoulder to shoulder in the worst of times, offering sound judgement. Manju’s muscle of calmness always made DBG’s many emotional, economic and physical difficulties seem less than they were. While DBG’s children were inspired by him in their professional choices, they have emulated Manju in many life and parenting decisions. DBG showed the children the world, while Manju kept them grounded. But when he expected that they would follow his vision absolutely, she exhorted them to find their own within it and beyond as well. The loss of DBG necessitated Manju becoming Lupin’s Chairman, a role she fulfils selflessly and wisely to this day”.

• Having served institutions like the RBI, how do you see policy and entrepreneurship intersecting in the growth of Indian pharma?

We know the power of modern medicine; the world's richest man two hundred years ago, Nathan Rothschild, died of an infection that would be cured by a Rs 20 antibiotic today. But this antibiotic wouldn’t costs Rs 20 without two decisions by two governments on opposite sides of the globe - the Indian Patents Act of 1970 and America’s Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984. The first replaced product patents with process patents to create a 35 year learning window for Indian entrepreneurs; in the 1960’s, medicines cost more in India than Europe and Western pharma had begun to neglect infectious diseases. The second enabled generics go from 1% of prescriptions in America to 90% today. Both interventions left deep wounds with Western Pharma - even a few years ago the CEO of a large American company called Indian companies pirates and generics as valueless. But despite all my cribbing about regulatory cholesterol or industrial policy, medicines wouldn’t be affordable or available without two bold governments. The next phase of Indian pharma’s future is different from its past and with five opportunities - generics, biologics, innovation, domestic market microstructure and contract manufacturing/research - and dealing with five challenges - science/research ecosystem, risk ecosystem, ease of doing business, China, and trade barriers.

• What does Desh Bandhu Gupta’s life teach young Indians about ambition, especially those without privilege or patronage?

The first three words of the book are Veer Bhogya Vasundhara; The Brave shall inherit the earth. If the best definition of success is not where you are but the distance from where you started, DBG’s live offers powerful inspiration on how the courage to make unconventional choices (he defied his parents on his choice of subject in college, leaving his teaching and multinational jobs, and persisting with Lupin in the early days when success felt distant). He did not have connections or capital – the currency of privilege but built a globally competitive company through the strength of his back, courage is his heart and the sweat of his brow. His story counters modern narratives that you need an opening balance to establish a closing balance. His superpower was his ability to attract, retain and grow talent; he recognized early that going fast needed travelling alone but going far needed a team that brought different skills of vision, strategy and execution.

• If you had to summarize the core idea of the book 'Made in India' in one sentence, what would it be?

This book chronicles the brave and admirable choices made by determined and enchanting people who created Indian Pharma told through the life of one of its co-creators, DBG.