Recipient of the India Young Business Achiever Award for 1996-97, Raghavendra Rao is the Managing Director of Orchid Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals Limited. This is the country's largest manufacturer and exporter of oral and sterile Cephalosporins, is also among the top five producers in this sector globally.

Graduating from IIM-Ahmedabad in 1979, Rao turned around a sick unit in a year's time, at Pure Ice Creams (P) Limited. After a 4-year stint at Ashok Leyland, he joined Standard Organics as Vice President in 1986. He then went on to set up four projects in the Sultanate of Oman, for the Al Buraimi Group.

Rao started Orchid Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals in 1994 and is steering the organisation towards perennial growth.

President and Chief Executive of RPG's retail business sector, Pradipta K Mohapatra is one of the country's most experienced retail chain heads.

This chemical engineer and Jamnalal Bajaj management graduate started off at L&T, picked up foreign service experience and was part of the team that set up the Dunlop service centre chain.

What started off as a mere experimental refurbishing of one store in Spencer's Plaza, has now kick-started a chain reaction that is giving shoppers more than ever before.

Today, his experience is "making it count" at Food World, Music World, Health & Glow and other such mass-retailing models.

With T T Narasimhan at the helm, the TTK group went through various phases of indenting, selling and industrialisation, setting the group on the path of growth, consolidation and expansion.

The TTK group grew from a trading to manufacturing concern, under the guidance of T T Narasimhan, whose association with the company began on October 1st,1939. Barely out of school, TTN - the eldest son of founder T T Krishnamachari, went into the field, to learn the ropes. In the early forties, when he took over the business, TTN was known to take his sales bag and a gramophone and travel throughout South India, to fairs and melas, in a stationwagon! Setting up camp at a shandy, he would play record after record of popular Tamil Film songs, which always drew a crowd. And when the gramophone did not work, he used to sing himself! In the field, at the offices and the factories, TTN was a loved and admired man, but in the corporate world, he kept to himself; a shy and private person.

After independence, the TTK group became a manufacturing organisation. TTN introduced products that were futuristic and ahead of their times. And this effort was powered by his belief that the future was in the consumer industry. He saw the need for rubber contraceptives long before the Government formulated a family planning policy. He pioneered the concept of pressure cooking. He realised the need for establishing factories and industries in backward areas. He saw a future for maps and atlases, and more recently, he was instrumental in TTK's manufacturing the Chitra heart valve.

Clearly, it was TTN's vision and faith that made the Group, what it is today.

|