Naveen Jindal

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.

The court case that secured the Indian citizen's right to fly the national flag as a matter of free expression — pursued personally by Jindal to the Supreme Court — is the public-interest litigation he is most associated with, and is a rare example of a promoter leveraging constitutional process for a civic question rather than a commercial one.

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.