Vikram Sarabhai, the cosmic capitalist whose vision encompassed Indian industry
Summary
- Vikram Sarabhai was a trailblazer in Indian business and science, advancing India's space program and helping establish IIM-A. But Sarabhai can be credited with a lot more firsts for India.
Vikram Sarabhai, the renaissance man in the starlit Indian business pantheon, stands apart as the most enigmatic and avant garde figure of the 20th century. While his contemporaries focussed on building traditional business empires, Sarabhai pursued a radically different vision—one that merged scientific advancement, social progress and entrepreneurial innovation, decades ahead of their time.
To understand Sarabhai the man is to understand a mind that refused to be boxed into conventional categories. Born into one of Gujarat's most enlightened and wealthy business families in 1919, he could have easily settled into running his father Ambalal Sarabhai’s many mills. Instead, he chose to pursue physics in Cambridge, focussing on cosmic ray research. But home is where his heart lay and after receiving his PhD in 1947, he returned to India and founded the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad.
It has been said of him that he chose to inhibit multiple centuries—his body in the 20th century, his mind in the 21st. This duality defined his sensibility towards business too. He was acutely aware that markets should dictate business rather than the purely socialist developmental enterprises set up by the government. To that end, in 1961 he set up the Operations Research Group (ORG), considered India’s first market research agency that used scientific methodologies to study consumer behaviour.
Alongside, he took on the mammoth task of setting up India’s space programme, culminating in the launch of the country’s first space satellite, Aryabhatta, in 1969. In his breathless odyssey of nation building, he was also appointed the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1966 after the death of his good friend Homi J. Bhabha.
The philosopher entrepreneur
What set Sarabhai apart was his distinctive and prescient business philosophy as well as management leadership style. As businesses grapple with emerging challenges of sustainability, innovation and social impact, his ideas of social transformation, indigenous research capabilities, and institution building offer strong exemplars for many of today’s tycoons who seemed to have strayed far from these ideals. According to Sarabhai, the real metric of success was not the wealth it creates for a few but the capabilities it builds for the many.
His most important legacy might be his models of leadership itself. He was part of the pioneering group that, in 1961, set up the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad in concert with the Harvard Business School. It was a clear expression of the idea that western leadership dicta would not quite work in the Indian context.
Thus, IIM-A’s curriculum included elements like rural development studies and courses on Indian philosophy so that students would go on to become social innovators and integrators rather than just business administrators. In a country where business is still largely family-controlled and hierarchical with many government controls, the philosophy manifested in how he built other institutions as well.
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At Ahmedabad Textile Research Association (ATIRA), which he founded in 1947, workers and researchers were given unprecedented autonomy and cross-disciplinary collaboration was encouraged, a rarity in post-Independence India.
Sarabhai’s most lasting impact on Indian business came through his founding of Sarabhai Chemicals, one of the first integrated pharmaceutical companies in India and which remained the country’s largest home-grown pharma manufacturer until the mid-1980s.
While most pharma companies of the time focussed on building generic drugs, Sarabhai insisted on investing heavily in research and development and fostering partnerships between academia and industry. His company was one of the first in India to export made-in-India pharmaceuticals to developed markets, setting standards that would later help establish India as the pharmacy of the world.
By advocating for the involvement of private industry in critical areas like space research, healthcare and education, he was able to catalyse the growth of industries previously overlooked by the state.
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Eccentricities and innovation
Sarabhai’s eccentricities were legendary and often tied to his innovative thinking. He was known to hold meetings at odd hours, sometimes holding discussions at midnight when his brain was at its sharpest. His office was famous for having multiple clocks showing different time zones, unusual for an Indian businessman and a sign of his truly global mindset.
Known to crosspollinate his ideas frequently from different domains, he had an unusual habit of maintaining different notebooks, one for business ideas, one for scientific ones, and one for social development projects.
A sign of his eclectic interests was the dance school Darpana, which he co-founded with his equally famous wife, the dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai. Here he would often host scientists and other guests from across the world to give them a taste of Indian culture.
A true visionary, Sarabhai felt, sees not just what does not exist but also what must exist. In both his many successes as well as his eccentricities, he embodies this principle. His untimely death in 1971 at the age of 52 left many of his visions unrealised and the country poorer for it.
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