Former Icra chairman Pranab Kumar Choudhary dies at 68

It was during his days at IFCI, that he was asked to set up the rating agency, with a seed capital of Rs 3.5 crore

Pranab Kumar Choudhury, former chairman and group CEO, Icra Limited, passed away on Tuesday in Kolkata. Choudhury, 68, suffered a cardiac arrest during a board meeting of Peerless Financial Services, where he had joined as chairman after retiring from Icra in 2015.

It was in 1991, when Choudhury was a deputy general manager of IFCI Ltd (then Industrial Finance Corp. of India Ltd), that he was  deputed to set up Icra Ltd. Today, Icra and its subsidiaries together form the Icra group of companies, with Moody’s Investors Service as Icra’s largest shareholder.  

In an interview in 2013 with Business Standard, Choudhury had said that as a primary school student in Derupur village near Shantinekatan, he had wanted to be a writer or a poet. Later, as a student of Goenka College of Commerce in Kolkata, he wanted to pursue a career in the army.


 
For Choudhury, often referred to as PKC, the journey from a village in West Bengal to the helm of one of the most prominent rating companies in India happened more by accident than by design.

Having completed his primary school in Derupur, Choudhury did much of his schooling in a district school in Siuri in Birbhum. However, the real challenge for him began during his college days, when he moved to Kolkata. Having been denied admission to the economics honours department at the prestigious Presidency College, for not having mathematics as a subject in higher secondary, Choudhury decided to study commerce at Goenka College.

After finishing his Masters in that stream, Choudhury joined a manufacturing firm, but soon realised accountancy lacked the respect accorded to engineers those days.  

A brief stint at Uco Bank was followed by a job at Industrial Finance Corporation of India (IFCI). While at IFCI, Choudhury won a scholarship to study at Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands. Upon his return, he was given the responsibility of setting up a credit rating agency, called Icra by IFCI.

“I was in a state of panic when I was first asked to head the company. I thought it was a punishment, and tried to wriggle out of it. But my seniors had confidence in me, and I was given the option  to return ay IFCI in case I did not like my new job,” Choudhury had said in one of the interviews with Business Standard.

For Choudhury his association with Icra was like nursing his own child.

With a seed capital of Rs 3.5 crore, Choudhury, who was appointed CEO of the company, decided not to recruit a single person in the first quarter after taking over.  

In his own words, “I was the chairman, and I was the peon. I would take an auto rickshaw to office, and stand in queues in post offices to deliver documents myself.”

With the interest earned from the seed capital in the first quarter, Choudhury, recruited a bunch of fresh graduates to formally launch Icra.

However, even with varied responsibilities, Choudhury’s interest in poetry hadn't waned. He avidly read works of iconic Bengali laureates such as Vishnu Dey, Sunil Gongopadhyay, Jai Goswami, Jibananda Das and Nirendranath Chakroborty.