I am also adding Kammas (ear rings? or Kan Phats of Nath Tradition) contribution in Industry, which also includes Kings of Southern Tamilnadu.
Kamma Naidu Entry – Lakshmi & PSG Groups
While the Gounders made up the bulk of Kongunad’s peasantry, the foray into industry was led by large landowning mirasidars from the Kammavar Naidu community: originally migrants affiliated to the Kammas of AP. Among them was G.K. Sundaram’s father Govindaswamy Kuppu- swamy Naidu. Belonging to Pappanaickenpalayam on the outskirts of Coimbatore, Kuppuswamy Naidu was when he set up a small ginning unit in 1905 that used a pair of oxen to pull the rollers in the gins. Coimbatore then had only one mill owned by Robert Stanes.The Stanes were basically coffee planters in the Nilgiris who had established a curing facility in Coimbatore in 1861, before starting the Coimbatore Spinning and Weaving Mills Company in 1888. To cater to this mill Robert Stanes encouraged locals to put up gins and it was ostensibly at his prodding that Kuppuswamy Naidu installed oil engines to replace oxen power. In 1910, Kuppuswamy Naidu promoted Lakshmi Mills. Although only a ginning factory, it was intended to become a full mill in due course. The plan was derailed due to heavy losses incurred by him during the War in forward trading and speculation in kapas. When the War ended Kuppuswamy Naidu was saddled with huge margin-financed stocks which he had to dispose of at throwaway prices in Mumbai.
As a result, the credit for floating the first ever Naidu-owned textile mill went to the family of Peelamedu Samanaidu Govindaswamy (P.S.G.) Naidu—which founded the Sri Ranga Vilas Ginning, Spinning & Weaving Mills in 1922. Close on its heels was the Radhakrishna Mills, promoted in 1923 by yet another mirasidar-turned-ginner and trader, V. Rangaswamy Naidu. Kuppuswamy Naidu had to wait till 1929 to commission his first Coimbatore Cotton Mills. Lakshmi Mills remained a ginning factory until 1933, before becoming a regular mill. All these concerns were largely funded by capital mobilized through community and kinship networks. The Ranga Vilas mill was incorporated with a share capital of Rs 3.3 lakhs. Of its 45 shareholders, 38 were Naidus, with the PSG family owning a 55 per cent controlling stake. Similarly, when Lakshmi Mills was registered in 1910 with a capital of Rs 100,000, Kuppuswamy Naidu’s chief associates were P.R. Narayanaswamy Naidu, S.N. Nain Naidu, P.R. Rangaswamy Naidu, and R. Krishnaswamy Naidu.
Someone who appears to have played a significant part in this period is K. Krishnaswamy (K.K.) Naidu, son-in-law of P.S.G. Naidu and beneficiary of the earlier-mentioned oil engine gifted by the latter for his daughter’s marriage. A mirasidar from Karadivavipudur village in Palladam taluka, K.K. Naidu not only supplied cotton to the ginning units of PSG & Sons but supposedly bailed the family out once by extending a personal guarantee, following financial difficulties arising from a contract entered into by them with Volkart Brothers, a Swiss trading firm. The PSG family reciprocated this assistance by contributing to the share capital of Sri Balasubramania Mills that K.K. Naidu himself floated in 1934. K.K. Naidu and his maternal cousin C.N. Venkatapathy Naidu were also initially partners in Kuppuswamy Naidu’s Coimbatore Cotton Mills. But differences of opinion between the directors caused a split, with K.K. Naidu and Venkatapathy Naidu deciding to have their own separate Balasubramania and Kasthuri mills, respectively.16 K.K. Naidu was instrumental in providing venture capital and related support to a number of other mills in Coimbatore. These include Sri Ramakrishna Mills Coimbatore Ltd of S.N. Rangaswamy Naidu (SNR group) and Sri Ramnarayan Mills of N. Velappan.
At the start of the century Kongunad had a solitary mill belonging, as we saw, to the Stanes. By 1947 there were 32 in the Coimbatore- Salem belt, accounting for 48 per cent of the Tamil region’s total spindle capacity. Of the 32, 16 were owned by Naidus, with 10 of them being controlled by the PSG, Kuppuswamy Naidu, and V. Rangaswamy Naidu groups. The three families exercised marginal control even in some of the remaining Naidu undertakings. Interestingly, most of these came up after the onset of the Depression, by which time the textile industry in Mumbai had gone into long-term decline. ‘The Depression actually helped us because the textile machinery manufacturers in Manchester were willing to supply their equipment cheaply, which we could install’, says G.K. Sundaram. Moreover, the new mills were consciously located nearer the villages, helping them to further prune capital and labour costs. Also, the crisis in the Mumbai industry may have proved a blessing by way of restricting competition— something that got an added boost through the clamping of duties on imported yarn in 1927 and 1931, besides the Civil Disobedience movement and the swadeshi (indigenous production) drive during this period.
But a more important reason for Coimbatore emerging as a mini- Manchester, even as the mills in western India were floundering, had to do with structural factors. Unlike the composite spinning-cum- weaving mills in Mumbai, the Coimbatore textile units were primarily spinning concerns, selling yarn to the numerous handloom weavers concentrated in the region. ‘We never faced a serious problem of marketing, since Coimbatore was itself a big handloom centre’, notes G.K. Sundaram. The substitution of mill yarn for handspun yarn actually stimulated the cottage weaving industry by enhancing raw material availability and contributing to the latter’s productive capacity. This physical proximity and symbiotic link with the handloom sector—in later years this extended to the knitwear and power loom clusters in adjoining areas like Tirupur, Erode, Karur, and Salem— conferred the region’s mills with a tremendous advantage over the Mumbai industry and also explains its continued resilience today.
Kammas in Southern Tamil Districts:
An issue worth addressing here is: why couldn’t the successful industrial transition achieved by the Kammavar Naidus of Coimbatore be replicated by the same community in the southern Tamil districts, where, too, it took to the cultivation of ‘Cambodia’ in a big way. A plausible explanation may have been the entrenched European presence in the cotton markets of the far South. Being close to the Tuticorin port, the cotton-growing areas of Tirunelveli and other southern districts were basically geared towards production for the export market. The big European expatriate firms were, hence, active there right from the beginning. Volkarts built its first gin in Tuticorin in 1876. A. & F. Harvey followed suit two years later. Elsewhere, Rallis had gins in Sattur, Virudhunagar, and Tirumangalam. Before the century ended the Harveys also had spinning mills at Papanasam, Tuticorin, and Madurai. Kongunad, by contrast, was relatively virgin territory. The Stanes there had 46,434 spindles in 1941, whereas the corresponding spindleage with the Harveys and Binnys (who had the Buckingham and Carnatic mills near Chennai) was 465,424 and 119,108, respectively. All the mills of the Lakshmi, PSG, and V. Rangaswamy Naidu families put together had a spinning capacity of 205,724 or less than half that of the Harveys. The dominance of the Harveys can be gauged from the fact that its yarn prices set the market benchmark and other mills had to sell for ‘round about 2 annas less. These would well have deterred the southern Naidus from taking a leaf out of the books of their Kongunad brethren, who ironically may have benefited by being distant from the ports.
But not all the pioneering Naidu entities have built on the lead given by their founders. The V. Rangaswamy Naidu group was ranked forty- seventh out of the country’s top seventy-five industrial houses listed by the Monopolies Inquiry Commission in 1965. The Industrial Licensing Policy Inquiry Committee of 1969, too, rated it fifty-third among seventy-three premier groups. Apart from owning a clutch of textile units (Radhakrishna Mills, Jayalakshmi Mills, Tirumurti Mills, VR Textiles), the group had forayed into sugar (Kamala Sugar Mills) and aluminium (Madras Aluminium Company Limited or Malco). Most of these are now either closed (including Radhakrishna Mills) or have been sold (Malco, which was acquired by Anil Agarwal’s Sterlite Indus- tries in 1995).
The PSG family is known today mainly for the trust set up by the founder’s four sons—P.S.G. Venkataswamy Naidu, P.S.G. Rangaswami Naidu, P.S.G. Ganga Naidu, and P.S.G. Narayanaswamy Naidu—in 1926, running several educational institutions in Coimbatore. It also has an ‘industrial institute’ that manufactures motors, pumps, machine tools, and castings, even while PSG has ceased to exist as a business group per se. The original Sri Ranga Vilas Mill has been taken over by the state-owned National Textiles Corporation (NTC). Sri Kumaran Mills, established by the group in 1936, is now under D. Krishnamurthy, whose father G.V. Doraiswamy is the son of P.S.G. Venkataswamy Naidu. Another mill, Sri Varadaraja Textiles, is with Krishnamurthy’s brother D. Varadarajan. Then we have Sri Karthikeya Spinning & Weaving Mills of G.R. Karthikeyan, the grandson of P.S.G. Ganga Naidu through G. Ramaswamy. G.R. Karthikeyan is incidentally also the father of Narain Karthikeyan, ‘the fastest Indian on wheels’. All these are mills not big by modern-day standards or even in relation to some of the newer and more dynamic textile conglomerates. The only entrepreneur of note from the PSG stock today is probably Rajshree Pathy, the granddaughter of P.S.G. Ganga Naidu through another son, G. Varadaraj. She heads Rajshree Sugars & Chemicals, which has two sugar mills at Theni and Villupuram districts with a crushing capacity of 7,500 tcd. Rajshree is married to G.K. Sundaram’s son S. Pathy, although she insists that her business, set up in 1990, is distinct from that of Lakshmi Mills.
Among the old mirasidari Naidu business families, it is only Lakshmi that has survived. Beginning with mills, the group diversified into textile machinery by investing in Textool Company (started in 1946 by a Sheffield-trained engineer, D. Balasundaram) and Lakshmi Machine Works (LMW) in 1962. It also went into making artificial fibre through South India Viscose (SIV)—a joint venture with the V. Rangaswamy Naidu family—in 1957, besides promoting a fabric processing company, United Bleachers, in collaboration with some other mills in Coimbatore. SIV was taken over by the Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry group in 1983, before being wound up in 2003. In the same year Textool was merged with LMW. United Bleachers was sold in 1996 and eventually declared sick. While Lakshmi Mills (with over 200,000 spindles) and LMW are still there, it is the latter that is now the real cash cow. With a 60 per cent share in the domestic spinning equipment market, LMW is seen as being one of the few global manufacturers of the entire textile machinery range.
The waning influence of the Naidu textile gentry does not, however, mean that the community is a spent force. On the contrary Naidu capital has moved on to other areas. Even in textiles, they continue to wield significant power, though the new magnates are no longer drawn from traditional mirasidar ranks, as we will find out in the following section.
New Vistas
Father of Coimbatore Foundry – Narayanaswamy Naidu
Like textiles, the origins of Coimbatore’s fabled engineering industry lie in the commercialization of its agriculture. The progenitor of its first foundry—today, the region has some 600 of them—was Narayana- swamy Naidu. Hailing from Pappanaickenpalayam, the village from where Kuppuswamy Naidu came, he initially worked in Robert Stanes’ workshop (the latter, besides popularizing cotton ginning using oil engines, also introduced the lathe and the drilling machine to Coimba- tore). In 1922 Narayanaswamy Naidu opened a small unit to repair gins and sugarcane crushers. Since procuring castings was not easy then, he is believed to have gone all the way to Kochi to study the operations of the crucible furnace at the Cochin Shipyard. Two years later the Dhandayuthapani Foundry (DPF) was born. By 1928 it had produced Coimbatore’s first belt driven pump. The PSG Industrial Institute similarly started off as a workshop—to service and manufacture ploughs and other farm equipment—followed by a foundry that came up almost the same time as DPF.
Coimbatore’s Enduring Symbol -G. Doraisamy (G.D.) Naidu
But if there is one enduring symbol of Coimbatore’s engineering ethos it is G. Doraisamy (G.D.) Naidu. Indeed, so pervasive is the legend of this ‘Thomas Alva Edison of India’ that parables detailing his exploits abound to this day. Originally from Kalangal village where his father, Gopal Naidu, farmed about forty acres, G.D. Naidu (1893– 1974) studied for barely three years in the local school. He left the village as a 20-year-old, the apparent trigger being an auto-cycle belonging to an English settlement officer. The Englishman, one Mr Lancashire, had visited the village on survey work in this strange-looking vehicle that became an object worthy of possession for the young Kalangal resident. The story goes that G.D. Naidu went to Coimbatore and worked as a hotel boy for a couple of years to save enough to approach the same Mr Lancashire and convince him to part with the bike. Once got, the machine was ripped apart; the parts were dismantled and reassembled a sufficient number of times to permit a thorough scrutiny of its structure and working.
How true the above tale is in all its minute details cannot be ascertained. What definitely exists is a photograph of G.D. Naidu seated on the said auto-cycle. And what cannot be denied is the man’s creative genius and self-experimentation capacity, proof of which is the range of things he designed and made on his own: valve radios, slide rules, clocks, a 16 mm projector and movie camera with a distance adjuster, a model two-seater car, a vote-recording machine, and an electric razor- cum-blade that he got patented in Germany. The ‘Rasant’ razor, incorporating a small motor and operated by dry cells fitted inside, was made by G.D. Naidu at a factory in a German town called Heilbronn.32 Many of these inventions can be seen at a museum in Coimbatore bearing his name, which also displays the famous auto-cycle and numerous gadgets accumulated from his travels round the world.
G.D. Naidu’s signal achievement though was in developing the country’s first indigenous electric motor in 1937 along with D. Balasundaram, even before the Kirloskar Brothers. It was the motor’s success that fuelled the foundation of Textool by Balasundaram and later on LMW. How the two went about it is a story in itself, best told by G.D. Naidu’s son G.D. Gopal: ‘First, they made the castings and then the windings, the shaft and the stamping. In the beginning, the bearings and enameled wires were being imported, which stopped when War War II intruded. So, they fabricated a machine to make and draw the wire, followed by an enameling plant to produce the enamel for the copper wire. They also tried to manufacture the bearings by making the steel balls and rings. By then, the War had ended.’
As a businessman G.D. Naidu’s career was no less spectacular. After the stint at the hotel he worked in a ginning factory, before managing to mobilize capital to establish his own gin. But like many others he was bitten by the trading bug and went to Mumbai, where his associate in cotton speculation and blowing-up savings was none other than Kuppuswamy Naidu. With little money in hand, G.D. Naidu offered his services as a mechanic to Robert Stanes who, instead, advanced him a loan to buy a bus. This coach, operating between Pollachi and Palani in 1920 with G.D. Naidu himself behind the wheel, was the precursor to the United Motor Service (UMS). By the 1930s UMS was running a fleet of 600 buses across Coimbatore, the Nilgiris, and the Cochin- Malabar districts. G.D. Naidu left his distinct imprint here as well. Among his innovations were an automatic ticketing machine (a variant of his vote-recording machine), a vibrator-testing device, and auto- radiators requiring little water. UMS further diversified into manufacturing radios, fans, pumps, motors, valves, sanitary ware, wet grinders, and assorted goods like electronic voltage stabilizers and mosquito terminators. Some of G.D. Naidu’s ambitious plans to undertake commercial production of the ‘Rasant’ electric razor and even putting up an automobile factory in Coimbatore failed to take off. The locally available steel did not meet the specifications of the Norwegian steel that he had originally used to fabricate the blade.
The UMS group still remains, though its activities are somewhat low profile, focusing mainly on tool and die making, plastic injection molding, prototype design, and the manufacture of precision lathes and CNC (computer numerically-controlled) machines. Likewise, DPF continues to manufacture pumps, motors, monoblack, diesel engines, and machinery spares, while not being the force it was in the pioneering days of Narayanaswamy Naidu. Balasundaram’s inventive zeal has been carried forward to an extent by his son B. Jayachandran, whose Jaya Automotives has the distinction of developing the first indigenous diesel engines for the ‘Ambassador’, ‘Premier Padmini’, and ‘Standard 2000’ cars, besides rolling out India’s first ‘own car’ by the name of ‘Mayura’ in 1986. The contribution of G.D. Naidu, D. Balasundaram, and Narayanaswamy Naidu (one should perhaps include Robert Stanes as well here) etc. has been to foster a culture of industrial research and shopfloor innovation that has become a hallmark of Coimbatore. From producing its first pump in 1928 and India’s first motor in 1937, the organized pumpset industry in Coimbatore is alone today worth Rs 1,200 crore, out of an all-India market of Rs 2,500 crore.34 And this is a sector dominated by Naidus: CRI Pumps of G. Rajendran , Fisher Pumps (part of the Sharp Tools group of K.K. Ramaswamy), Mahendra Pumps of Mahendra Ramdas, Suguna Industries of V. Lakshminarayanaswamy, Ellen Industries of V. Dhamodaraswamy, and Perfect Engineers of R.R. Ranganathan. Much of the region’s strength is derived from its foundries and skilled human resource base. These have made it a manufacturing haven for castings, auto components, and light engineering goods of all hues.
L.G. Balakrishnan & Brothers
When G.D. Naidu bought the first bus that he drove in 1920, the man on the conductor’s seat was a cousin of his, L.R. Govindarajulu (L.R.G.) Naidu. By the time the second bus arrived, they had split the business. While UMS operated the Coimbatore–Kerala belt, L.R.G. Naidu’s Varadaraj Motor Service (VMS) plied eastern districts like Madurai and Tiruchirapalli. Over time VMS also grew into a fleet of 250 buses. From a fleet operator L.R.G. Naidu went into bus bodybuilding and in 1937 founded L.G. Balakrishnan & Brothers (LGB). From producing chains for two-wheelers and four-wheelers LGB has become India’s largest supplier of automotive and industrial chains (‘Rolon’ brand). Another company, Elgi Equipments, was set up in 1960 to make garage service station equipment. It is the market leader in this segment—covering vehicle hoists, wheel balancers, crash repair systems, paint booths, and airconditioning recovery units—and also a major player in air compressors and diesel engines. The Elgi group is today a premier light engineering conglomerate. Other concerns in its fold include Pricol Limited (the biggest domestic manufacturer of automotive dashboard instruments and accessories), Elgitread India (a specialist in tyre retreading machinery and raw materials), Elgi Electric & Industries (motors, alternators and diesel generator sets), and Elgi Ultra Industries (which produces ‘Ultra’ wet grinders, among other things). Even though automotive engineering has been the Elgi group’s forte, like all mainstream Naidu industrial houses it has a stake in textiles, through Precot Limited and Super Spinning. ‘Our entry into spinning was mainly due to V.N. Ramachandran, who was married to my sister, Vijayalakshmi’, says L.G. Varadaraj, son of L.R.G. Naidu. Premier Cotton Spinning Mills Limited was incorporated in 1962 by V.N. Ramachandran and his brother N. Damodaran, along with L.G. Balakrishnan (Varadaraj’s brother). Precot is an offshoot of this company and, together with Super Spinning, controls over 300,000 spindles. While Precot and Super Spinning are part of the Rs 2,000 crore Elgi Empire, V.N. Ramachandran’s son, R. Jagadish Chandran has his own Premier Mills Group with 200,000-plus spindles. Both these groups are currently as big, if not bigger, names in the textile industry than the old Naidu mill magnates, the Lakshmi Group included.
K G Group
Another important ‘new’ Naidu textile combine is the KG Group. Its founder, K. Govindaswamy Naidu, was born in 1909 at Peelamedu, the village of P.S.G. Naidu. However, unlike the latter’s 1,200 acres plus landholding, Govindaswamy Naidu’s father, Kondasamy, cultivated a mere twelve acres. Govindaswamy was not enamored of agriculture and migrated to Annur, which is an hour’s drive from Coimbatore. There he first took up road construction, before starting a raw cotton trading venture in 1932. By 1942 he had built his first gin to separate lint from the raw kapas and was supplying to the scores of mills that had come up in and around Coimbatore. Over the next couple of decades he added three more ginning factories. The next stage was to enter milling, which his group did by not establishing new, but buying existing, units. In 1970 it took over Sri Kannapiran Mills, followed by the Kadri Mills Coimbatore Limited in 1975, both of which were in corporated in 1946 and had changed hands several times.
Since then the KG group has become a fully-integrated textile major with operations straddling ginning, milling, weaving, knitting, the manufacture of terry-towels (Sharadha Terry Products Limited), denim fabric (K.G. Denim Limited) and jeans-wear (‘Trigger’ jeans). The Rs 700 crore group also has interests in the production and export of gray iron castings through CPC Limited, formerly Coimbatore Premier Corporation. Further, there is the K. Govindaswamy Naidu Medical Trust which runs the 350-bed ‘super-speciality’ KG Hospital in Coimbatore and an Eye Hospital that claims to have conducted 65,000 free cataract surgeries with intra-ocular lens implant. Heading the trust is
G. Bakthavathsalam, the group founder’s son, who is a cancer surgeon from the Madras Medical College. ‘I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Mount Sinai, Chicago, in the early 1970s, when my father called me over to start the hospital. He had studied only till the fifth standard, but was keen that I become a doctor. We began with 25 beds in 1974 and today it is an Rs 40 crore business on its own’, he notes
Aravind Eye Hospital Dr G V –Infinite Vision.
An even more remarkable medical venture is the Aravind Eye Care System (AECS) of Govindappa Venkataswamy, from Sivakasi, Southern Tamil Nadu, who initiated it as an eleven-bed private clinic in 1976 after retiring from Madurai’s Government Medical College as head of its ophthalmology department. Today, it is a case study in the world’s top business schools, forming part of every other management guru’s evangelical armory. In 2004 the five Arvind Eye Hospitals at Madurai, Coimbatore, Tirunelveli, Theni, and Pondicherry, with a 3,600-bed combined strength, performed a mindboggling 228,894 surgeries and handled 1,635,500 outpatient visits. Cumulatively, from 1976, AECS has conducted more than 2.2 million eye surgeries and attended to nearly 18 million outpatients. Three-fourths of surgeries and two-thirds of outpatient visits are serviced free of cost; yet it has proved to be a financially self-supporting venture with an estimated annual turnover of Rs 60 crore. The system also has a manufacturing division, Aurolab, to produce intra-ocular lenses and suture needles, which have considerably brought down the cost of cataract surgeries.
Poultry Sri Venkatesa Group
Besides textiles, engineering, and hospitals, the Naidus have a presence in industries such as paper and poultry. The Venkatesa group— whose founder G.V. Govindaswamy Naidu established the Sri Venkatesa Mills in 1934—owns a number of paper mills in Udumalpet taluka, even as its original textile business has grown to roughly 85,000 spindles. The group, now under the founder’s son-in-law V. Genguswamy Naidu, also runs a chain of schools all over Tamil Nadu and a women’s college at Udumalpet.
Equally well known in paper is R. Ramaswamy who, in fact, pioneered the design and manufacture of paper plants in India. Formerly employed with LMW, he set up Servall Engineering in the early 1970s, which is a leading integrated paper and pulp machinery maker. Ramaswamy’s company also had a coated duplex paperboard facility that he sold in 2000 to L.M. Thapar’s Ballarpur Industries, before the latter disposed of the same to ITC in 2003. B. Soundararajan’s Suguna Poultry group is another Naidu concern to have come up only in the last two decades or so. It is now an Rs 1,000 crore enterprise—next to Venkateshwara Hatcheries—with operations extending from the breeding of grandparent and parent stock to contract broiler farming, poultry feed manufacture, and processing meat for exports and the domestic market.
