Naveen and Narendra Pasuparthy have made the six-decade-old Nanda Group a formidable player in the poultry business. The siblings are now betting big on their brand Nandu's
The poultry market looked like a headless chicken. “It was absolute mayhem,” recalls Naveen K Pasuparthy, who came back from the US in 1995 and joined the family business of livestock farming started by his father PS Nanda Kumar in 1963. In February 2006, India reported its first case of avian influenza (bird flu); TV channels went berserk with their news coverage, a fear psychosis gripped the nation, and chicken prices crashed by a staggering 85 percent.
The second-generation entrepreneur got his first crucial learning: The livestock business has a zero shelf-life. “And when you don’t have shelf-life, you get slaughtered like chicken,” says Naveen, who studied in the US, and worked there selling voice and data communications for a multinational company. “I never wanted to come back and join the family business,” he confesses.
A ‘Taliban’ and ‘hostage’ situation, though, compelled him to fly to India, Naveen explains, saying his mother acted like a professional extortionist. “If you want your brother to study in the US,” she outlined her unconditional demand, “you will have to come back home”. To save the ‘educational life’ of his younger brother, Naveen sacrificed his ‘professional life’. “That’s how I got blackmailed,” he says, adding that he was compelled to come back in 1995. The hostage negotiations in Afghanistan, he says jokingly, could well trace their origin to his house and the way his mother acted. A decade later, in 2006, he was wondering if joining the family business had been the right move. He could see his chicken empire crumbling. “I felt helpless. There was little that I could do,” he recalls.
His father, though, stayed calm. “What comes down has to go up, son,” he tried to comfort Naveen. “And what goes up has to come down,” underlined the patriarch who also shared another pearl of wisdom: “When you make money, spend little. Save for the tough days.” Naveen braced himself to survive the torrid storm and continued with the business of poultry breeding, hatcheries, animal feed manufacturing, contract farming and poultry disease diagnostic labs.
Two years later, in 2008, Naveen’s younger brother was feeling like a headless chicken. A software engineer, Narendra completed his master’s in information science from the US, had a stint of over eight years at two startups in Silicon Valley and came back to India in 2005 to restart and relaunch Nandu’s, a value-added frozen product business started by his father in 1989. Due to limited appeal and infrastructure hurdles—cold chains were still missing—the vertical was shut down in 1993.
(This story appears in the 12 August, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)