O.P. Jindal

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 early decision to focus on downstream steel products — pipes and tubes — rather than upstream steelmaking, was a function of the licence era's capital constraints, and produced a group whose first scale came from specialised manufactured goods rather than commodity steel.

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.

His death in a 2005 helicopter crash, alongside the subsequent sibling split of the operating businesses, became the standard Indian case for the difficulties of succession when a founder's personal authority has held a diversified house together.