Licence-Raj Strategy

Karsanbhai Patel (b. 1945) founded Nirma in 1969 from an Ahmedabad garage, manufacturing a low-priced detergent he initially delivered door-to-door on weekends while holding a state-government job, a story that became the standard reference point for Indian bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer entrepreneurship.

The launch of the Vimal brand in the 1970s positioned Reliance as a consumer-facing textile name at a time when Indian fabrics were largely commodity-traded, an early instance of the brand-building instinct the group would later apply across telecom and retail.

His adoption as a spiritual heir by Gandhi and his role in funding the independence movement gave the Bajaj name a political legitimacy that translated, after independence, into regulatory and licensing access that proved commercially valuable across the licence-raj decades.

The biography frames Dhirubhai's signature strength as the systematic cultivation of relationships across the political and bureaucratic apparatus, a capacity the author argues was inseparable from the group's ability to obtain licences, capacity clearances and favourable policy outcomes in the licence era.

The same work stresses that his operating instinct combined high leverage with rapid capacity expansion, a formula that delivered growth but also exposed the group to episodic regulatory and political risk that surfaced repeatedly through the 1980s and 1990s.