Jindal Steel & Power

Naveen Jindal (b. 1970) leads Jindal Steel and Power and is the public face of the Jindal Group's second generation, distinct from his father O.P. Jindal's founding generation both for the operating scale of JSPL and for his parallel political career as a two-term member of Parliament.

Om Prakash Jindal (1930-2005) founded the Jindal Group from a single pipe-manufacturing unit in 1952 and built it into a vertically integrated steel-and-power house, with the operating businesses later split among his sons into JSW, Jindal Steel and Power and other entities.

The move into upstream steelmaking and into captive power generation in the post-liberalisation period reflected the unwinding of the licence-era capital logic, allowing the group to integrate backward into the commodity end it had previously been barred from.

The coal block allocations awarded to JSPL in the licence-era allocation regime, and their subsequent cancellation in the 2014 de-allocation following the CAG and Supreme Court findings, are the defining regulatory episode of JSPL's last decade and frame the licence-era raw-material allocation model in its sharpest form.

The transition from the cancelled allocations to the international coal and ore acquisitions (Shadeed, later the El Mutun and African concessions) reflected the group's response to the loss of domestic raw-material access: substitute it on the balance sheet by acquiring upstream assets abroad.