Over two decades ago, Rajendra Chamaria took a flurry of concrete steps to build a cement empire in the Northeast. The audacious gambit is now paying off for the regional Goliath—vice chairman and MD of Star Cement
Rajendra Chamaria, Vice chairman and managing director, Star Cement
Image: Amit Verma
Delhi, May 1986. It was an outrageous idea. “There was no Google search. So that was the only way to find out,” recalls Rajendra Chamaria, who scoured the serpentine bylanes of Daryaganj for hours on a scorching Sunday, and finally found the book. A small cement plant in Jaipur was up for sale, and a young, third-generation entrepreneur—Chamaria’s family has been in the business of timber and manufacturing of concrete sleepers for railways in the Northeast—sniffed an opportunity to cast a separate identity for himself. Chamaria, who graduated in Assam and joined his father in 1979, got a cursory glimpse into the nuanced world of limestone, clinker, cement, mortar and concrete through the book. “It made me familiar with cement,” he says. “There was some kind of instant bonding.”
Well, bonding bred curiosity, and aspiration. Armed with the rudimentary and theoretical knowledge, the ambitious founder started building a concrete castle in the air. A week later, he dashed to Jaipur, bought the plant which was barely functional, got it fixed, and started the pilot. Though the venture trudged through the formative years, it gave Chamaria the much-needed operational insight, and encouraged him to take bigger and bolder bets. A few years later, in the early 1990s, he set up another plant, in Himachal Pradesh. Though the input—in terms of intent, investment and commitment—was bigger than the Jaipur gambit, the output remained the same. The plant had a muted growth, which made Chamaria wonder if he was ploughing the sand. “I knew I was missing something,” he realised.
The answer, interestingly, was neither in the book, nor with Google. The secret lies in going back to the roots of any venture. In Chamaria’s case, though, the missing puzzle could only be traced by going to the roots of the family business. He explains. There are at least two fundamental things that one must try to figure out before zeroing in on any location to roll out a business. “Is there a market or are raw materials readily available,” says Chamaria, whose forefathers migrated from Rajasthan to Assam over one-and-a-half centuries ago, and built a sizeable timber empire in the Northeast.
(This story appears in the 31 March, 2023 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)