If you listen to Singh tell it, DLF is doing just that. Barely known
outside its north Indian base a few years ago, the company is building
houses, apartments, office towers and shopping malls across India. It
has plans for airports, hotels and cinemas. Singh, 75, doesn't just want
to cash in on India's economic boom, he wants to be a prime mover in the
country's drive to erect modern cities where India's new middle class
can live, work, shop and play. To do all that, though, DLF needs a lot
more money, which is why on July 5 the company listed on the Bombay and
National stock exchanges. An initial public offering for just over 10%
of the company closed in mid-June and brought in some $2.24 billion. In
the three weeks after it listed, DLF's shares rose nearly 9%, giving it
a market capitalization of $24.5 billion — roughly $3 billion more than
General Motors. The IPO, which was about twice the size of India's
previous biggest, netted Singh and several family members, who together
hold 87% of DLF, nearly $20 billion — enough to make them one of the
richest clans in the world. "Frankly that is embarrassing to me," Singh
says. "That is not the yardstick by which I want to be known. I feel
proud that what I championed 25 years back has blossomed into something
good for the country. That is what I want to be known for."
....
Singh's plan centered on Gurgaon, a dry, scrubby plain in the state of
Haryana, just across the border from New Delhi. If he could buy enough
land and then convince authorities to change their regulations, perhaps
he could outdo his father-in-law's success in New Delhi. By 1981,
though, the company had acquired just 40 acres. Singh had failed to
persuade the state government to change a law preventing companies from
acquiring farmland for commercial use. Frustrated and despondent, he sat
beside a well one scorching summer day. "What the heck can you do in
this place?" he recalls asking himself.
That was when the driver of an overheating four-wheel drive stopped to
request some water. The supplicant was Rajiv Gandhi, son of Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi and soon to be India's leader himself. "Rajiv
Gandhi was like a ray of hope for India," says Singh, who hit it off
with the political scion and was later repaid for his water when Gandhi
pushed the Haryana state government to ease commercial-development
restrictions on farmland. "It didn't take me any time to convince him,
frankly," Singh says. "We found that we were on the same wavelength very
quickly." Their two-hour conversation that day as Gandhi's car cooled,
says Singh, was "the birth of the entire urban-development policy of
India today."
cont'd....
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1649060_1649046_1649030,00.html