Anil Agarwal on Policy Betting

India's disinvestment program opened the door to two landmark acquisitions: BALCO (51% for Rs 551.50 crore in 2001) and Hindustan Zinc Limited (about 65% in 2002). Both were sleepy public-sector mining firms; Agarwal bought them cheap, modernized them, and turned HZL into the world's largest integrated zinc producer within two decades.

In 2022 Vedanta and Foxconn jointly committed roughly $20 billion to build semiconductor and display plants in Gujarat, with Vedanta holding 60%. The deal was positioned as a strategic deep-tech bet for India, though execution and partnership frictions later tested the thesis.

In a 2016 Hindu interview at his Worli sea-facing bungalow, Agarwal — then 62 — was framed as the school dropout from Patna who had built a $13 billion resource conglomerate spanning oil, copper and aluminium. At the time, Vedanta had invested $35 billion in India, of which $10 billion sat in Odisha alone, with returns still partly unrealized — bets Agarwal described as 100-year projects rather than near-term plays.

The bullishness on Indian natural resources was unqualified: India imports 85% of its oil, all copper and all gold despite, in Agarwal's framing, having geology superior to China but producing only 6% of China's output. He estimated India's import drain at roughly $400 billion annually — money he argued should be circulating domestically if resources were properly opened.

The Odisha plant was running at only 40% capacity at the time of the interview, with Agarwal projecting 80-90% utilization in 6-8 months pending bauxite access. He contrasted India's 3.5% bauxite exploration rate with the West's 73%, framing the gap as both opportunity and policy failure — Vedanta positioned as the operator ready to close it if government released the resource.

Agarwal insisted that government and business must sit together to unlock India's natural resources, arguing that the country imports 85% of its oil and all of its copper and gold despite having the geology — and that India's exploration rate (3.5% of bauxite reserves) versus the West's 73% was an unacceptable missed opportunity he aimed to close.