N. Srinivasan and the story behind the great revival of CG Power
The Great Revival is more than a corporate rescue story. It examines leadership under pressure, disciplined optimism, and the role of trust, tracing how one executive turned a beleaguered company into a success.
When N. Srinivasan walked into CG Power on 26 November 2020, he knew he had accepted the most daunting assignment of his career. What he did not know was that it would become the subject of his first book—The Great Revival: CG Power’s Comeback from Bankruptcy to a $10 Billion Company—released today with a foreword by Uday Kotak. The book chronicles one of India’s most dramatic corporate resurrections, told by a man who entered the story reluctantly, worked tirelessly, and emerged transformed.
Srinivasan, a long-time Murugappa Group finance leader credited with building Cholamandalam Finance, was handpicked by the group’s promoters to lead the rescue mission. He hesitated at first. “I thought I had made the mistake of my life," he recalls in an interview with Mint, describing how CG Power’s liabilities, litigation, and paralysis seemed insurmountable during the dark early days of the pandemic.
The company had been declared a non-performing asset, owing ₹2,600 crore to secured creditors, ₹750 crore to unsecured lenders, and large sums in unpaid dues to employees and the tax department. Its overseas guarantees had also gone bad, exposing it to further claims.
What pulled him through, he says, was discipline and method. An early riser who begins clearing email at 3:30 am, Srinivasan instituted what he calls “symbolic war rooms"—thematic WhatsApp groups that tracked every moving part of the business. He stayed in all of them, sometimes active, often silent, always absorbing information. This communication cadence became the early backbone of the revival.
His first task was financial triage. Leveraging credibility built over decades with lenders, he secured fresh equity and matched it with long-term loans from SBI and others. “I knew the bankers well," he says; that familiarity helped him secure funds even when the company’s situation looked hopeless.
He then negotiated to settle secured creditors at 43% of dues, cleared vendor and employee payments in full, and restored CG Power’s working capital cycle. Within months, CG moved from an NPA to a standard asset, and by the end of 15 months, the balance sheet was fully recast.
But the book—and Srinivasan’s telling—makes it clear that finance alone did not deliver the turnaround. His leadership style, marked by humility and a disarming lack of confrontation, was equally instrumental. Aware that CG Power had a long history and a culture of its own, he deliberately chose not to impose Murugappa practices overnight.
“The first six months were about earning their trust," he recounts. He visited plants during the peak of covid—masked, cautious, but determined—and met workers, unions, and vendors personally. He promised transparency, quick payments, and a clean break from past chaos; the organisation rallied.
Operationally, Srinivasan launched Project Mudra, Project Lean, and Project Regain. The first revamped procurement practices and reduced risk-priced premiums vendors had built in after years of delayed payments; the second brought in Japanese consultants to overhaul productivity, workflow and shop-floor discipline; and the third focused on winning back lost customers and market share. Together, these efforts lifted margins and morale, setting the company up for consistent quarterly improvement that continued for four straight years.
Real estate, surprisingly, became one of the thorniest—and most lucrative—battles. A contentious dispute over land in Kanjurmarg looked destined for prolonged litigation until Srinivasan negotiated an unexpected settlement worth over ₹400 crore. He repeated the feat with the company’s Mumbai headquarters, persuading bankers to accept repayment so that CG could secure a much larger owned space in a future redevelopment. “You are in the business of banking, not real estate," he reminded the lenders—a line that would find its way into the book.
The book also features cameo insights from SBI’s Dinesh Khara and Murugappa Group’s Vellayan Subbiah. Khara discloses that he had discussed stressed-asset possibilities with Vellayan nearly three years before the acquisition and confesses that CG’s stunningly quick turnaround “may have actually worked against the bank", which saw its loans prepaid far earlier than expected.
Vellayan, for his part, admits he first noticed CG Power because it owed Shanti Gears ₹10 crore—but instead of pushing for recovery, he phoned a banker to understand the deeper story, and the acquisition trail began.
The bond between Vellayan and Srinivasan—who once reported to him—is threaded through the narrative. Vellayan gave him a free hand, stepping back despite initial scepticism about matters like retaining the Mumbai headquarters. In the book, he contrasts Eastern and Western approaches to stressed-asset resolution, suggesting that the CG Power story shows how pride, culture, and collective purpose can be as powerful as transactional negotiations.
The book also captures how Srinivasan strengthened CG’s strongest businesses while reviving its weakest. The motors division, which contributed over half the company’s revenue and Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization), received his personal attention: he met dealers, OEM customers, and suppliers himself.
The railway traction motor business, starved of working capital for years, recorded 27% growth once liquidity returned. “The tiger was alive and back," he says. Later came the ambitious foray into semiconductors—unexpected even to him, he admits, which culminated in government approval for a large OSAT facility.
Away from the balance sheet, the book reveals a lesser-known side of Srinivasan: the family man inside a family of corporate heavyweights.
His brothers are N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, and N.S. Ganapathy Subramaniam (NSG), former COO of TCS. When the trio meets, conversation inevitably turns to the corporate world so much so that, he jokes, “our wives complain we meet for work, not as family".
As Chandrasekaran’s responsibilities have grown, such meetings have become rarer, but today he releases Srinivasan’s book, joined by NSG in a rare family-professional convergence.
Now retired from the Murugappa Group, Srinivasan says he wants to spend the coming years teaching the turnaround story at business schools. Several institutes have already reached out. “If there is an opportunity, I will definitely spend time," he says, fitting for a man who writes, walks, thinks, and works with the austere discipline of a monk, and yet has engineered one of India’s most spectacular corporate revivals.
The Great Revival is ultimately not just a book about saving a company. It is a study in leadership under pressure, in disciplined optimism, in the power of trust, and in the quiet force of a man who believed nothing succeeds like success—and proved it.
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