DCM loses stalwart

Lala Charat Ram, the youngest son of the late Sir Shri Ram (who founded the DCM group) and the man credited with building DCM's chemicals and sugar businesses and mentoring corporate leaders such as Shiv Nadar and Ashok Soota, died at 90 in a Delhi hospital today afternoon after a prolonged illness.

In recent years, Charat Ram had gradually faded from the corporate landscape of the country, having handed over the reins of his business to his sons, Deepak and Siddharth Shriram.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, he was in many ways the pre-eminent businessman of the North, known for his sharp business skills as also for a mercurial temperament that could swing from extreme generosity and amiability to an irascible temper.

He set up the sprawling DCM chemicals and fertilisers facility at Kota, Rajasthan, in the mid-1960s, which is now run by his grand-nephews, Ajay and Vikram Shriram.

For decades, he efficiently ran DCM's sugar factories at Daurala and Mawana in Uttar Pradesh as well as its chemicals business in Delhi. In the 1970s, after his older brother, Bharat Ram, set up a new venture, Shriram Fibres, outside the DCM umbrella, Charat Ram too branched out with companies of his own.

The two brothers were neighbours on Delhi's tree-lined Sardar Patel Marg, but could not get on in business; persistent tensions and bickering (including on succession issues) led eventually to a four-way division of the group, which had once been India's fourth-largest before stagnation set in in the 1980s.

Apart from being an able businessman, Charat Ram was known to have a good eye for managerial talent and under him DCM got the reputation of being a nursery for future CEOs.

One executive he was particularly fond of was Neelkanth Ratnakar Dongre, who had joined DCM in 1964 as a management trainee. Over the next 15 years, Dongre became Charat Ram's most trusted executive.

In the 1970s, when agitating workers had blockaded the Jay Engineering Works factory in Kolkata, Dongre loaded crucial documents in a truck, and drove it over the factory wall and all the way to Delhi. Charat Ram too went out of his way to promote his protégé.

The two soon became business partners, even as Charat Ram's younger son Siddharth left because of differences with his father and joined Citibank overseas. Then the inevitable happened. Charat Ram made peace with his son and the two decided to oust Dongre, who lost many of the companies that he had been managing despite prolonged court battles.

Charat Ram is survived by his wife, Deepak and Siddharth Shriram, and two daughters, Shobha and Gauri.