He then proceeded to answer it himself:

“Industry is where you put your capital in dust and then try and recover it (in-dust-try).”

It was meant as a joke, and it landed as one. But it is also the most honest summary of Rajesh Gupta’s career that anyone could offer, including the long line of analysts who now track his company.

For most of those thirty-five years, the dust did not give the money back. The plants were built into shortages that turned into gluts. The banks stopped returning his calls. At social parties, he says, people did not want to be seen talking to him.

And then the dust began to pay.

Today, at sixty-one, Rajesh Gupta is the Managing Director of Lloyds Metals & Energy, and the inconvenient truth he keeps repeating — to us, to his own people, to the market — is that almost none of it went to plan.

There was no grand vision: only a family in steel, a mine he was forced to accept, a quarter-century of survival, and a temperament built for exactly that. This is the story of how the dust paid him back.

The company, in numbers

Lloyds Metals & Energy Limited (NSE: LLOYDSME). Market capitalisation around 1,01,160 crore rupees, having crossed 1 lakh crore in 2026 — for Lloyds Metals & Energy alone, one company within the wider Lloyds group. FY26 (consolidated): total income 17,306 crore, up 155% year-on-year; net profit 3,829 crore, up 163%. Surjagarh, Gadchiroli — the single largest iron ore mine in India, with environmental clearance for 55 MTPA and dispatch ramping toward 26 MTPA. Second pellet plant (4 MTPA) commissioned in 2026.

Over the last five years, Lloyds Metals’ revenue has compounded at 105% a year CAGR, and profit after tax at 140% CAGR.

When the market cap crossed a lakh of crores, Rajesh did not celebrate the number. He distrusted it, and waved it away:

“Yesterday we turned one lakh crore. But the day before yesterday was no different from a month before. I was always worth one lakh crore — the market has only now recognised it.”

It is a revealing thing to say. A man who spent twenty-six years being told by every bank and institution in the country that he was worth nothing does not learn to take the market’s verdict at face value, in either direction.

The round trip underneath those figures is the real story. A decade of decline into FY21 — the stock down some 87% from its 2011 high — and then, in five years, every rupee of FY21 earnings became sixty-eight. He explains the trough without drama:

“In 2011 we were part of the Lloyd Steel supply chain, and that company went away — we exited it. As a standalone sponge-iron maker, on one end we had no steel plant, and on the other no iron ore mine. One we were still waiting for; the other had just gone from my hands. We went through very tough times. Our job then was simply to survive — and I think we did that.”

The recovery, when it finally came, still seems to catch him off guard:

“It is overwhelming, in a way. But we always knew the mine was there. A lot of hard work went in during that period — and here we are.”

A small bag of coins

The Guptas were a steel family before they were a steel company. Rajesh’s father traded steel in Bombay through the 1960s — buying and selling, much of it for others, in an economy where the quota that came with goods was worth more than the goods themselves. He was, even then, an unusually ambitious man, the first steel trader to take an office in the financial district:

“We were the first to open an office in Nariman Point. People said, Gupta is crazy — why does he even need an office there?”

Yet ambition, in that India, still meant something modest.

He tells a story, as he remembers it, about an early World Bank loan to India in the 1980s, when the family sat down and did the arithmetic, rupee by rupee, on a figure of perhaps a hundred million dollars. His father’s verdict was modest by design:

“My father said we would get one percent of it, and we would be happy.”

And the era itself capped the imagination:

“There was no ambition, because India was in a different place. The duties were 100-120%. They called it the Hindu rate of growth — four or five percent. We were happy to grow at that. Why would you want to grow any faster?”

His own entry into the business was less a decision than a surrender.

He had wanted to study science — IIT, perhaps MIT. He was good at it, and stubborn about it.

His father was unimpressed: in the Marwari circles of the time, a boy who studied was a boy being spoilt, and the assumption was that he would end up in trading regardless.

His father could not change his mind. A neighbour did — a relative in the building, an All-India gold medallist in surgery with three years of hospital internships behind him, who had walked away from all of it to run the family’s fabric-dyeing business.

Rajesh watched a man with the most glittering credentials imaginable choose the family trade anyway, and something shifted:

“I could not admit defeat. But I saw that man, and I changed my thinking.”

A few days out of the tenth standard he turned up at his father’s office unannounced.

The early jobs were not glamorous. He was, by his own description, an accountant’s accountant — formalising cash vouchers, then entering them in the books, working a large mechanical calculating machine in the years before electronic calculators existed.

Later there was the stainless-steel patta business, where he carried a small bag to collect the day’s takings from the utensil makers near Alankar Cinema.

They sold raw material by the kilo; the utensil makers sold finished goods by the piece; and every evening the cash came back in two- and five-rupee notes.

He dates his own start in the business earlier than any payroll:

“I entered the business when I was maybe ten — dialling phones for my father all day, because in those days you could never get through on a long-distance call. It has been in the blood.”

His father had a way of teaching patience that did not involve the word. One day in the monsoon, with the rain already coming down, he was simply told that a shipment was arriving and that he should go to the port and get it unloaded. When he asked what exactly he was supposed to do, the answer was almost nothing at all:

“You go. Sure, it is raining. But you are not made of mud — you won’t melt.”

He learned the rest the way everyone did then — slowly, and by getting things wrong.

The lesson he says he values most from those years was about ego, not steel. Given his first rake to clear on his own — fifteen hundred tonnes, six days to unload — he kept every piece of paperwork to himself rather than hand any of it to a colleague, because handing it over meant sharing the credit.

For six days nothing moved; the collection clerks did not even know how to take the money. He draws the moral plainly:

“That was my first real lesson — to delegate, to work as a team. If you keep all the paper with yourself, the rake just sits there.”

And the only plan, through all of it, was his father’s refrain:

“Just keep going. Something or other will grow.”

Asking what a flange is

Around the age of nineteen or twenty, with his elder brother (and boss!) — six years older, and by his own account the more naturally ambitious of the two, Rajesh was sent to run the family’s engineering factory in Andheri, next to the airport.

He was not an engineer, and he has never pretended otherwise:

“I asked my engineers what a flange meant, and they all laughed at me. Of course they laughed — I was a nineteen-year-old boy, and engineers don’t have the polish to hold it in.”

What he took from the humiliation became one of the organising principles of his working life:

“That is when I learned that the right way is to keep asking more and more questions. It is fine if people laugh. Curiosity helps. You just have to have the heart to sit through it and let them laugh.”

It is not a throwaway line.

Two hours into our own conversation, he reminded us that he had opened it by asking us ten questions about our composites — the resins, the fibres, the moulds — with the unembarrassed directness of a man who decided forty years ago that looking ignorant was cheaper than staying ignorant.

The factory also taught him the customer’s side of the business, and again the lesson arrived through a mistake.

Sent to a consultant’s office on one of his first client visits — to explain why a job was late, not to win an order — he made the rookie error of blaming the client for the delay. The consultant, a family acquaintance, took him aside:

“He told me — you may be right, but you cannot keep saying it. The customer is always right. So we learned to blame him a little more politely.”

The factory made pressure vessels and heat exchangers for the likes of IPCL and Engineers India — fabrication first, then, within three or four years, the mechanical and structural design, and eventually the chemical design, the heat and mass transfer, too. It was good-margin work, always.

The problem, he says, was never the margin; it was the turnover. The engineering business was steady and profitable but small, and for decades it would become the thing that kept everything else alive.

Forty years on, his nephew Krishna Gupta runs that same business, and in a recent review meeting offered the very excuse Rajesh once offered — that the drawing had not come on time:

“The same cycle has continued after forty years. I told him: this is part of the business. You have to factor it into your projections.”

That fabrication arm is also, improbably, where the group got its name. The family had three businesses then, and the engineering one grew into the public face:

“We had three parts then — a stainless-steel operation, which we wound up in ‘84; the engineering business, which is still running; and trading. We started the fabrication in a bigger way as Lloyd Steel, and that became the face of the company. So the name became Lloyd Steel, and then we became the Lloyd group.”

Which is how a Gupta enterprise came to be called Lloyds. He has long since made his peace with it:

“I did think about it once. But I thought of changing my name to Lloyd — not the other way around.”

And the engineering company that started it all in 1974 still runs, which is why he calls the whole group, without a trace of irony:

“We are a fifty-year-old startup.”

No limitations

The steel ambitions, when they came, were not modest.

The family had been one of the few large steel traders to cross over into manufacturing, and through the late 1980s and into the 1990s they pressed the advantage hard.

They put up galvanising lines in Nanded. In Wardha they commissioned what Rajesh says was India’s first hot-rolling mill in the private sector after SAIL — six or seven months before Tata Steel’s, he notes with some pride, and two years before Jindal’s. By the mid-1990s the group had completed four or five public issues, and at the peak:

“Until ‘98 we had no limitations. We had done four public issues, and we were told we were bigger than Jindals in those days.”

The ambition fed on itself.

“The ambitions were very big — bigger than they should have been. We went so fast that when the downturn hit, we were running at 120kmph. And when a wall comes up at that speed, you crash very badly.”

Running at 120kmph when the wall hit

The wall was the steel cycle, and it is worth understanding why he speaks of its inevitability with a fatalist’s calm:

“You put up a plant when there is a shortage. Everybody gets the same idea at the same time. By the time the capacity arrives, the cycle has turned — both demand and supply.”

When they entered, steel consumption was rising and duties sat at seventy or eighty percent.

Then liberalisation pulled duties down to twenty-five percent, imports arrived, competition arrived, and an international slowdown arrived, all roughly at once. Four new plants came up within two years of theirs.

The crash, when it came, was total. They could not service the banks, and they became defaulters. He says it without flinching:

“We went bankrupt. We didn’t pay the banks. We were defaulters.”

We asked what that was like to live through, and he answered with the social detail rather than the financial one, which tells you where the wound actually was:

“Nobody liked us. You go to a social party, and people don’t want to talk to you.”

And yet there was a peculiar steadiness underneath, a refusal to feel guilty that the family seems to have shared.

“I was wearing an HMT watch. I was not taking money home. We were never guilty about it.”

The losses, he is careful to add, were not only the market’s fault. There had been a diversification into real estate at exactly the wrong moment. When we asked whether it had been a strategic error, he refused to let himself off lightly:

“It was a mix of strategic errors — timing, over-ambition, bad execution, everything. It was not only the market that was to blame.”

The personal cost ran underneath the financial one. His father, once tireless, stopped working in the last eight months of his life — he felt that everything had turned against him. He died in 1999, near the bottom of the cycle. What did the two brothers tell themselves through those years?

“Don’t think. Don’t give up. Just keep going. Keep turning up. Keep turning up.”

Two banwas

Buried inside the wreckage of the steel business was an asset nobody wanted — least of all the Guptas.

In 1993, a minister effectively forced a mining licence on them — not a lease, a licence: the right to eventually mine iron ore at Surjagarh, in the forests of Gadchiroli, in a part of Maharashtra long considered impossible to operate in:

“It was not wanted by us. The minister forced us to take it. We were not interested, and we did not have the money to invest in it anyway.”

What followed is, in his telling, a story measured in fourteen-year units — two long waits, two banwas:

“In ‘93 we got the licence. It became a lease after fourteen years, in 2007. And then, from 2007 to 2021, it turned commercial after another fourteen years. Two banwas.”

For most of that time the mine was a liability, not an asset.

The steel plant at Wardha — the sponge-iron operation’s one real customer — was gone, leaving the group stranded with one part of a broken value chain. And even after mining began around 2016–17, the operation lost money for four or five years before it turned commercial.

Even the word “impossible” undersells the place. Gadchiroli was insurgency country, and the cost of being there was not only financial:

“There was a lot of resistance — not from the government; they were welcoming, they wanted us there. It was the safety. There have been deaths. Not in my own family, but every executive is family. Seventy trucks were burnt in 2017. The murders had happened in 2013. So when we finally started mining, we were very cautious in the beginning.”

Caution gave way to scale faster than anyone expected:

“We started with three million tonnes in the first year. Within two years we had ramped to ten. This year it is twenty-six — it is the largest iron mine in India.”

If you want to understand why he is so unsentimental about the mine that made the group’s fortune, it helps to know that for nearly three decades it mostly cost him and his partners money.

But the mine also encodes the one strategic conviction he holds without irony — that in steel you must own your way back up the chain.

The family had pushed downstream from hot-rolled into cold-rolled, and upstream into sponge iron, always trying to reach the iron ore itself:

“If you are always begging for raw material, or begging to sell large chunks of your steel, you have already lost. That is the first principle of steel. With the mine, the big volumes are taken care of, and then you have many small customers to sell to. Otherwise your pricing can never be competitive.”

Twenty-six years without a loan

Here is the number in this story that should be hard to believe, and is true:

“From 1998 to 2024 — twenty-six years — we did not go to institutions for loans.”

From 2002 to 2008 in particular, no bank and no institution in India would lend the group a rupee, on account of being defaulters before.

So they did the counter-intuitive thing: they began repaying old loans in the hope that someone, eventually, would lend again. The cycle turned up for a while — between roughly 2002 and 2008 they repaid a great deal and even expanded — and then it turned down again, and the same starvation resumed.

How do you survive twenty-six years without debt, and how do you expand? The honest answer is that for much of it they did not expand, and he refuses to dress up the period in euphemism:

“We were not growing during that time. People call it a twenty-five-year consolidation. It was not consolidation. It was suffering.”

Two things kept the lights on.

The first was the steady, good-margin engineering business, the unglamorous fabrication shop in Andheri that had been compounding since his twenties, throwing off cash when nothing else would.

The second was land. The very real-estate holdings that had helped sink the group in the crash now became its lifeline:

“The real estate that was a bad word for us earlier became our saviour. We kept selling old land. Some money kept flowing in; some assets were sold; sometimes we even made a little on them. They were very difficult times.”

There is a buried piece of Bombay industrial history in this period that he offers almost as an aside, and that we cannot resist passing on.

He has a more general theory about where money is actually made in India, sharpened by all those years of watching cash flow from only one or two places.

The reliable sources, he has concluded, are land — real estate that suddenly appreciates, or a mine — and very little else.

“In India, the real capital flows from land or a mine or farming. It is the origin behind all wealth in India today. It will change in the future but this is how it was until today.”

It is not a romantic theory.

But it explains why a steelmaker spent a quarter of a century being kept alive by selling plots of land, and why, when a mine finally turned, he knew exactly what he was holding.

A double-engine company

For the better part of three decades Lloyds had owned the two ends of the steel chain and almost nothing in between — a mine it could not yet work at the bottom, a steel ambition it could not yet feed at the top. What it lacked was the muscle to join them.

“People said we were a one-mine show — a risk. So we are de-risking the company in two or three ways: a different geography, a different product, and additional mines.”

That arrived in 2021, when B. Prabhakaran and his family — of Thriveni Earthmovers, one of India’s largest mine developers and operators — took a co-promoter stake with equal control.

Lloyds became, in Rajesh’s phrase, a double-engine company.

“Thriveni came in in 2021 and took a substantial chunk. Over time we restructured it so it is an 80% subsidiary — we are two MDs, a double-engine company.”

The first engine is Lloyds Metals itself: the mine-to-metal chain taking shape across Gadchiroli and Chandrapur. The second is Thriveni, since restructured into an 80% subsidiary and run by two managing directors — the operating arm that brought the equipment, the crews and the process knowledge, and rebuilt Surjagarh from an underused lease into an integrated mine.

Together they set out to own every rung of the ladder Rajesh had spent a career trying to climb.

Note - BHQ stands for Banded Hematite Quartzite

The chain begins at the mine.

Surjagarh yields two kinds of ore: a limited body of high-grade direct-shipping ore, and a far larger seam of low-grade BHQ — the banded rock most miners leave alone.

Rather than truck it out, Lloyds grinds the ore near the pit at Hedri and pumps it as slurry: an eighty-five-kilometre pipeline to Konsari today, a hundred-and-ninety-five-kilometre network to Chandrapur and Ghugus under construction, each line saving eight hundred to a thousand rupees a tonne against the road.

Inside the 10 MTPA grinding circuit at Hedri. Video: Mukesh Verma, mineral-processing engineer at Lloyds — via LinkedIn.

It is in Hedri that the BHQ is beneficiated — lifted from around thirty-five percent iron to sixty-six or sixty-seven — turning the ore into clean concentrate.

That concentrate climbs the chain step by step. It is fired into pellets — twelve million tonnes of captive capacity rising across Konsari and Ghugus.

Pellets feed sponge iron, made at Ghugus — one of the oldest DRI plants in Maharashtra — and at Konsari, both run on captive power.

And sponge iron feeds steel, the rung Rajesh always wanted: long products, wire rod and reinforcement bar, at Ghugus; flat products, hot-rolled coil, at Konsari — about 4.2 million tonnes planned, on the way to the eight to ten he describes for later.

Each rung earns more than the one beneath it, and none of it leans on an outside supplier.

“Chandrapur was the original project — the one that did Rs 200 to 400 crore in the early days, at about 250,000 tonnes. Today it is 750,000 tonnes, and we are building a 1.2-million-tonne plant.”

The two manufacturing hubs end up mirroring each other. Ghugus, in Chandrapur, is the old heart of the company — sponge iron and power since the 1990s — now adding the long-steel line.

Konsari, in Gadchiroli, is the new one — pellets, sponge iron and the flat-steel mill — and until recently was barely more than a name on the pipeline. Both drink from the same mine; captive power, scaling past a hundred megawatts and increasingly solar and wind, runs the energy-hungry middle.The second engine reaches well beyond Vidarbha. Thriveni brings the book Prabhakaran built — iron ore in Odisha, the country’s largest NTPC coal mine in Jharkhand, baryte, overseas coal, a gold contract — a diversified mining business bolted onto Lloyds’ own.

“Apart from the Gadchiroli mine, Thriveni also has MDO operations in Odisha — Prabhakaran’s original business — the largest NTPC coal mine in Jharkhand, operations in Indonesia, a bauxite mine in Andhra, and a gold mine.”

Then a third leg, the newest and the boldest — out of iron entirely, into the metals the next economy is built on.

“We are on the internet now, on AI. You cannot run any of it without copper, or iron, or steel. We are in the most important materials there are. And any mine takes ten to twelve years to come up, iron or copper — I was a prime example of that.”

In the Democratic Republic of Congo it is already coming out of the ground:

“One is Surya Mines — around a hundred square kilometres, reserves in the fifty-to-sixty-million-tonne range — where we already produce cathode. We are the first Indian company to go end to end, from ore to finished copper, through the electrolytic route, not smelting. The second, larger one we are doing with a US company, Virtus; copper there starts in about eighteen months. We already have three thousand people on the ground in Congo.”

By early 2026 the plan had become metal: commercial cathode began flowing from Surya that March. The larger venture is Chemaf — a copper-and-cobalt platform in the same Katanga belt, in which Lloyds took 49 percent — widening the bet into cobalt, toward roughly 100,000 tonnes of copper and 20,000 tonnes of cobalt a year, backed by Trafigura, Orion and Virtus and folded into the US–DRC critical-minerals framework signed late in 2025. In the April–June quarter of 2026, Surya shipped 2,700 tonnes of cathode — making Lloyds the first Indian copper company to go from mine to market.

None of it, he insists, was improvised. It was a plan laid down when the mine was first allotted, simply completed a generation late.

“Go back to 1994, when the mine was allotted. We had the steel plant, and we went backward — to sponge iron, and then to the ore. It was a thought-out process. We are just completing it, maybe twenty-five years later.”

An economy where there was none

The murders of 2013, the seventy trucks burnt in 2017, the caution of the early mining years — hold those facts against the mine as it stands today: twenty-six million tonnes a year moving out of the same forests, worked by people from the same villages. Something changed in between, and it was not the geology.

For decades the district had been held hostage — one of the poorest places in Maharashtra, seventy percent forest, no industry, no roads worth the name, and an insurgency that enforced the standstill with the gun.

Companies surveyed and left. The ore sat in the hill; the district sat still.

Rajesh’s reading of that deadlock, by his own account, was always economic rather than tactical:

“We understood one thing very early. The district did not need more force — it needed work. A young man there had nothing: no job, no school for his children, no hospital. Whoever gives him those things, he will build with them.”

So they went in with a payroll instead of a security plan. With Prabhakaran running the mining operation, the workforce was drawn from the villages around the hill.

Training centres turned farmhands into operators, drivers and technicians. Schools and hospitals went up in places that had done without both; roads followed the trucks.

More than twenty thousand crore rupees flowed into a district that had never seen investment on that scale, and upward of six thousand local people found steady work — the first industrial wages the district had seen at any scale.

“The people of those villages are our people now. We train them, they run the machines, they run the trucks. Their children are in school because the mine is there. That is the real production of Surjagarh.”

Then came the part nobody had planned for. Men began walking out of the forest to surrender — in groups. Lloyds trained them and put them on the payroll like anyone else; by 2025, more than sixty former insurgents were working for the company.

“We never asked anybody what they were before. They took the training like everyone else, and today they earn like everyone else. I am more proud of that than of the tonnes.”

The hill they all work beside remains what it has always been to the people around it — sacred ground, home of the god Thakurdeo, climbed by thousands of Adivasis every year. The mine works beside all of it.

And that, in the end, is the answer to the riddle of the two banwas: the licence took twenty-eight years to turn commercial because a licence cannot mine where an economy does not exist. Lloyds’ real feat in Gadchiroli was the economy it built. The ore followed.

The owner has no options

If you ask Rajesh how he picks people, you get a characteristically unfussy framework — attitude, aptitude, and knowledge, in roughly that order:

“It is mostly attitude. Then aptitude. Knowledge is the third thing.”

He has watched people who were, by the polite standard of the time, not good enough turn themselves into excellent operators on the strength of attitude alone, and watched the most capable people leave the moment the company wobbled.

That last observation is the seed of his strongest conviction about people, and it comes from a story he has clearly been carrying since his twenties.

The qualified engineers at the engineering company, all of them from good firms, used to needle the family for not being professionals, until a young accountant on the staff shut the argument down:

“What is wrong if the owner is a professional? Just because his name is Gupta does not make him unprofessional. A professional is anyone who works for the company wholeheartedly.”

And then came the line that reframed his entire thinking about who actually carries a company:

“The only difference between you, the professional, and the owner is that the owner has no options. He cannot leave and go elsewhere. He has to survive. A professional has the option to leave when things go bad. The owner stays, because she/he has nowhere else to go.”

The logic of that line runs straight into how Lloyds is run today. Across the group’s companies, the staff are given equity:

“Now, across all our companies, we give our people equity via our ESOP pool. Every white-collar employee gets a stake that builds up over five years. But not just that — every blue-collar employee also gets stock options.”

The point, in his telling, is alignment — to give employees a version of the owner’s predicament, a reason to stop searching for the next job and start treating this one as the thing they have to make work:

“Once people stop searching for jobs, they start working.”

The shift shows up in the numbers: attrition across the group has fallen from about 24 percent to roughly 13 percent in four years.

There is a hard-won tenderness in how he talks about this. For most of his career, he could not protect his people from the thing that frightened him most:

“Until five years ago, I was always worried about my payroll. Every entrepreneur has the same problem. You keep worrying about the payroll until you finally have enough surplus.”

He no longer worries about it:

“We look after our people more than we should — more than they expected us to.”

For a man who spent twenty-six years a hair’s breadth from not making it, that may be the metric that matters most.

Green only if it makes sense

It would be easy to file Rajesh as a survivor with good instincts and no theory.

That would be a mistake. On the material science of his business — and on the fashionable economics of green steel — he has the most heretical thinking in the conversation, and it is the part of the interview where, for a man who claims no scientific training, he is most obviously in his element.

His objection to most of what passes for green industry is thermodynamic:

“To be green, the world has to reduce, reuse, recycle. But nobody reduces. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. If you will not cut consumption, you only change the source — instead of petrol you burn ethanol, and the land goes to corn and there is a famine somewhere. Now it is solar. But what will you do with that land after twenty years?”

He had watched the enthusiasm up close. On an early trip to the United States he was given the standard lecture about reducing emissions, and answered it by walking his hosts out to the parking lot:

“I said, come outside and look at all these big cars. Where is the greenness here? Why don’t you all travel in one car? The whole lot is full of the biggest cars there are.”

His point was not that climate does not matter. It was that consumption, not labelling, is the variable nobody wants to touch — and he makes it about himself as readily as anyone:

“Today everyone has an air-conditioner. Ask your peon — he has one; your accountant has two. Twenty-five years ago he had none, and nobody thinks about the power. When we were growing up we were not even allowed to run the AC. The first time I slept in one was after I got married. In the car, the driver was not allowed to switch it on — if he did and we found out, he was fined. It was about saving fuel, saving money.”

The nomenclature itself he dismantles with relish:

“Low-carbon steel literally means steel with low carbon content in it. What people mean is low-carbon-emitting steel — and those are two completely different things.”

And steel, by its chemistry, is one of the great carbon emitters of any industry, because reducing iron ore means combining iron oxide with carbon and producing carbon dioxide:

“There is no way out of it.”

The only real lever is the cleanliness of the iron you begin with, and that is exactly where Lloyds works:

“We take the ore and beneficiate it from around 35% up to 66-67%. We will be making the cleanest iron ore in India, and we pipe it from the mine straight to both steel plants. We save the transport cost and the emissions of moving it. The steel we will make carries far lesser carbon than anyone else’s in India — and we did it not only to be green, but because it is the more viable thing to do.”

That last clause is the key to the man. He is building one of the lower-carbon steel operations in the country and refuses the halo, because he did not build it for one. The fleet of electric and LNG trucks he is assembling to move material around the region is the same story:

“Again, not out of the goodness of my heart only. Not to make it green only, but because it is more viable.”

“Steel — or any product — can only be green if it makes sense. If it is viable. That is my whole principle.”

The same calculus runs the power side — more than 100 MW of solar and wind feeding the operation, built because the economics work, not for the label.

And underneath it sits a grievance — the grievance of an operator doing the real thing while the accounting rewards the gesture.

Carbon arithmetic sorts a steelmaker’s emissions into three buckets: what the plant burns itself, the power it buys, and everything that moves around it — the ore hauled in, the steel hauled out.

That third bucket, scope three, is where steel’s diesel-soaked logistics live, and it is precisely the bucket Lloyds emptied by building a pipeline instead of running trucks. It is also the bucket the rulebooks ignore.

Europe’s carbon border tax and India’s carbon credit market both measure what happens inside the factory fence; on their ledgers, ore that arrives by pipeline and ore that arrives in trucks look exactly the same.

“If there is green steel in India, it will be ours — we transport through our own pipeline, with the least emissions. But that is not counted as green steel anywhere in the world’s calculations. The regulators do not require scope three. CBAM, CCTS — none of them account for the biggest scope-three emissions — the logistics upstream and downstream.”

Nobody does the R&D

If green steel shows how Rajesh thinks, research and development shows what he believes India is missing — and, by the end, what he believes he personally still owes. His diagnosis of his own industry:

“There has been no real invention in steel for thirty-five years.”

The continuous caster, the last meaningful step, was an improvement rather than an invention; after the blast furnace, the genuinely new iron-making processes have nearly all failed at industrial scale, because they cost too much to run — the laboratory was never the problem.

He extends the same scepticism, gently, to Planet’s own composites work and to specialty steels — most of it, he argues, is stepwise improvement, not invention.

He has lived the distinction himself: in the downturn of the late 1990s he drew up a list of things steel ought to replace, starting with the truck body, then still built of wood.

“I was not inventing anything — only trying to push it. The truck body was made of wood, and wood is heavier than steel. Getting people to adopt is far more difficult than the making.”

He is not putting the work down; he is insisting on the distinction, because invention is the rarer, dearer thing India barely attempts:

“There is almost no R&D in India. Companies don’t do it properly. For the project and operations people, research feels like a waste of time, money and energy — it is not their job. You have to set up a proper R&D outfit, and you have to have people who are genuinely passionate about it.”

He reaches, unprompted, for the canonical examples — the great corporate laboratories that seeded the modern world, Bell Labs and Xerox PARC — and marvels at how much value spilled out of a single campus, and how completely the companies that funded it eventually let it go. The lesson he draws is structural:

“The ones who have the trillion dollars are the ones who have to spent billions. The big players are the ones who spend to experiment.”

The one place he has put serious research money is the rock itself, and he explains why with a chemist’s relish:

“BHQ is banded hematite quartz — the iron sits between bands of quartz, and quartz is very, very hard. To crush it and liberate the iron takes a great deal of energy and technology. Nobody had done it in India until now.”

The size of the prize explains the trouble: against roughly 157 million tonnes of direct-shipping ore, Surjagarh holds some 706 million tonnes of BHQ — the difference between a mine measured in years and one measured in decades.

To even reach it, they drilled far deeper than the old surveys had:

“We went down two, three hundred metres — at the time, one of the deepest holes in Indian mining. As we went down, we kept getting hematite and BHQ. I give full credit to Mr. Prabhakaran; we looked at how Brazil and China liberate this ore.”

He is untroubled that the industry still doubts the bet:

“Even now, people don’t think we are doing the right thing. But it is what will make our operation sustainable — financially, in the green way, and land-wise.”

He is honest that he has not cracked it himself.

The company has stood up a beneficiation pilot plant — a 100-crore-rupee facility that earns no revenue but has already returned concentrate at yields above 38 percent, exactly the kind of patient, unglamorous research spend he is describing — but he does not claim to have built a research culture, and he knows the reason:

“A person like me can never be passionate about R&D. I can say, you do it, and I can fund you. The passion has to come from someone else; you have to be truly at it.”

And then he said the thing that, for a publication like this one, is impossible to read as anything but a small mission statement.

Asked whether he would carve out an R&D budget the way companies carve out a CSR budget, he did not posture:

“If I knew how to do it well, I would. Funding people like you is our small way of doing it. But we have to do more. Maybe that is my goal once I step back, in a couple of years.”

The real obstacle, he says, is attention:

“We all spend our time on the urgent and not the important. We are all guilty of it. We have to do the important — and this kind of thing is the important.”

No dream — just the next four years

We kept trying to get Rajesh to name a dream — a number, a destination — and he kept refusing, and the refusal is the most consistent thing about him.

The roadmap itself is concrete enough: over the next four to five years he describes a clear set of targets — eight to ten million tonnes of steel, of the order of a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of copper, some cobalt, some gold — with the mines, he says, already in place to feed it.

In a commodity, he argues, the demand question almost takes care of itself:

“If you can make it, and make it at a good cost, people will buy it. Wholesale always sells, as long as your costing is right.”

The retail products — the composite boxes and containers our own team is working on — he thinks are genuinely harder, because retail needs brand-building in a way wholesale does not.

He also thinks the whole sector is mispriced, and says so without heat:

“The materials business is valued at eight to ten times earnings. The new-economy businesses are valued at a hundred times. There is no logic to it.”

But ask him for the dream behind the roadmap, and you hit a wall, a deliberate one:

“A dream? None. I never had one, and I never will. Survive. Keep going. Slowly, slowly, slowly.”

When we pushed — surely the dream is the guiding force — he reached for his phone and showed us, almost shyly, the two lines he keeps as his own status. The first:

“Be confident. Be contributing.”

He explained it without embarrassment, which itself takes a kind of confidence. Sometimes he loses confidence, he admitted — understandable, for a man who has been through so much — but he still feels he is contributing, and it is a present-tense creed, not a future one.

He distrusts the grand dream on practical grounds:

“If I say I want a Taj Mahal but I don’t even have a hut, what is the use of such a dream?”

The useful dream, in his framework, is the one his people can actually execute against — get the pellet plant running in the next two months, and if it runs in three, that is dream enough.

The roadmap exists precisely so that nobody has to dream; when copper came along unexpectedly, the structure was already there to absorb it rather than be thrown by it. It is the discipline of a man who has stopped trying to predict anything:

“I have been through a life that is unpredictable. So how do you prepare for opportunity? You put money in the bank, and you wait. Be patient. The opportunities come; if they come, we look at them.”

There is a personal coda to it. The job he does today is unrecognisable from the one he did for thirty-five years — more corporate work, more licensing, more of the boardroom and less of the plant floor — and he does not miss the old version:

“If I no longer have to travel to Gadchiroli and Chandrapur, and instead travel to London and Singapore — that is the good part.”

He talks, repeatedly and half-seriously, about stepping back from his current role within a couple of years, before adding that his son Madhur, the executive director, would not thank him for saying so in print.

For all the refusal to dream, he insists the industrialist’s temperament is fundamentally hopeful:

“Every industrialist has to be the most optimistic businessman. Industry is about the future — you are automatically going long. A trader can go long or short; in industry, you do not think like that. And I have never thought about the end result.”

Be confident, be contributing

Late in the conversation, Rajesh gave us the lens through which he wants to be read, and it is the lens we have tried to hold up to him throughout.

We had asked him to name an entrepreneur he admired, and he chose Aditya Birla — for a reason we did not expect:

“He was a preserver. His grandfather created him. He did not create — he preserved. And he died so young. That is what I believe I am, because I think about those things more than about the creative part.”

It is an unusual thing for an industrialist to say — to place yourself among the keepers rather than the builders.

But it explains everything that comes before it.

“Choti choti baaton se poornata nahi hoti hai, poornata choti baat nahi hai.”

The way he reads it, completeness comes from the small things, so you must take care never to forget them.

Ask him to name the one thing behind the survival, and he does not reach for strategy. He reaches for the family:

“Number one is being together. In those bad years, from 1999 to 2021, when people thought we did not know what we were doing, if we had not stayed together — my brother, my uncle — it would have been very easy to disperse. And then I don’t know what would have happened.”

He wants the next generation to inherit the togetherness rather than a finished job — and says so as a kind of blessing:

“If the group is to be perpetual — like the Birlas, seven or eight generations — the job never gets done. You have to keep innovating. Be innovative, take a little risk, and be together. I hope the next generation never completes the job.”

His own role he describes with the same modesty as everything else:

“I handle the commercial side — the sales of iron and coal — and the compliances, the face of the company. Whatever nobody else wants to do, I do.”

The dust, in the end, paid him back. He still talks as though it might ask for the money back tomorrow.

Safe Harbour. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Financial figures are drawn from publicly available filings and the subject’s own statements and may not reflect the most current position. Forward-looking statements reflect the views and expectations of the individuals quoted and are subject to risks and uncertainties; actual outcomes may differ materially. Readers should conduct their own due diligence.

This story is based on an extensive in-person interview with Rajesh Gupta, Managing Director of Lloyds Metals & Energy. Company figures have been verified against public filings where available; figures cited in conversation are presented as stated by the interviewee. This is published by materials.club and is NOT a paid article.

Somewhere on that trip, one of them understood that what was happening to the boy was not normal — so, in the middle of the holiday, they took him to a local doctor, and that doctor found a pressure building inside his skull.

Then a sudden flight home. An MRI. Within two days, the answer — a brain tumour — and a trained surgeon ready to operate. It is the kind of sequence nobody stops to count.

Mirik came out of it with a slightly weak left hand and, much later, a question that would organise his adult life.

Ask him who saved him and he refuses the easy answer.

“For me to have been saved — in India, you don’t survive a brain tumour unless so many things work together. I got identified on a trip in Orissa; that’s when someone noticed there was a pressure in the brain. So now there is a doctor somewhere who identified it. Then I suddenly had to take a flight — the flight exists. You come here, you do an MRI — everything exists. In two days you identify the tumour, a trained doctor is available, and then they do the whole thing.”

“So the question is, who saved you? You can obviously go to the doctor — that is the right answer. But the depth of it is this: it’s a stack. Humanity has evolved to a level where all of these things can work together.”

He didn’t understand any of this at four, or even at twenty.

It surfaced years later, when he started reflecting on what it takes to do anything hard in the world. A stack — layers that each do their job and hand off cleanly to the layer above. Build the layers, connect them, and value flows. Miss one, and the whole thing fails, and nobody can quite tell you why.

This is the idea underneath everything Mirik has built.

He has spent the last decade trying to construct that same kind of stack — for materials, for capital, for the country — and running, again and again, into the one layer India cannot seem to supply. He has a word for the work of building and connecting those layers.

He calls it orchestration.

The boy who wouldn’t run the machine

There is a default script for someone in Mirik’s position, and almost everyone follows it. Your family already runs a large, fast-growing industrial company. You finish your education. You join. You go into operations. You learn the business by running the business.

Mirik read the script and put it down.

There was no rebellion in the reasoning — closer to reverence for what had already been built. He kept coming back to Newton’s line about standing on the shoulders of giants, and he took it literally as a job description.

“You stand on the shoulders of giants so that you can be farther. If the foundation has already been built, then my role isn’t to just run the foundation, to run the routine course. My role has to be to see farther — because someone has done the effort. You have a base.”

To him, inheriting a base carried a responsibility: climb off it and look further out.

“For me, at least, it was an opportunity as well as a responsibility: take it to the next level.”

The Gogris are a science family before they are a business family. His mother is a science graduate, his father an engineer — chemical engineering at ICT, a J-rank holder. His elder brother went to IIT Bombay before him. The dinner table was maths and science, and the idea that Mirik would go down the same path was only natural.

But the family business — the part everyone knew about — sat one layer down from where Mirik wanted to stand. Aarti Industries had been built on aromatic chemistry: take a petrochemical feedstock like benzene, run it through a series of reactions, and climb the value chain. It was real, it was large, and it already had an R&D function of a sort.

What it didn’t have, in Mirik’s eyes, was the foundational layer — research that starts from what the market will need and reverse-engineers the chemistry to get there, rather than improving the molecules already on the shelf.

“I would never have taken any day-to-day responsibilities. This idea that day-to-day operations are the right way to go — for me, at least, I don’t agree with that.”

That gap — between running the machine and building the next machine — is where he decided to stand. But he wouldn’t get there for almost a decade, and the road ran first through a cricket bat, a water-park ride, and a sumo-wrestling match on ESPN.

Bombay or nowhere

The first thing to understand about Mirik is that he is stubborn about places.

In 2007, on his first attempt at the JEE, he got a rank around 5,100 — good enough to get in somewhere, not good enough for IIT Bombay. He went, instead, to ICT — his father’s and uncle’s alma mater, and one of the country’s oldest chemistry and chemical-engineering colleges. (Several of Aarti’s own key people came through it.) He lasted fifteen days.

“After fifteen-odd days, I took a call — no, no, I’ll take a drop. At that time I decided two things: either I go to IIT Bombay, or I go out of India. It was not an option that I get any other IIT. Either IIT Bombay, or outside India.”

What pulled him was the culture — something he’d absorbed during his brother’s years, going to the Mood Indigo festivals, getting glued to the place. He’d seen a slice of IIT Bombay’s social fabric, and ICT, for all its chemistry pedigree, felt like a different world.

So he dropped a year, studied, even took English coaching on the side, and came back with a rank around 2,400 — not brilliant, he’ll tell you, but enough.

He says plainly that he did not, academically, make the most of it.

“I actually did not study in the five years I was in IIT. I hardly studied — got through with basic grades. Most people I’ve met have a similar story.”

What he did instead was learn how networks and culture compound. He was part of the Mood Indigo core group. In 2010, his team brought sumo wrestling to India as an event — and got it onto ESPN’s 8:30 p.m. primetime slot, a proper two-to-three-minute segment.

He’ll downplay the technical value of those years. What he walked out with was the network.

“When you talk about folks like Cityflo or Atomberg — along with a lot of our early investments — the trust deficit is very low, because you know everyone. These are alumni.”

The rewritable years

Between finishing IIT and joining the family business, Mirik did something most of the second generation don’t: he ran a startup that was, by design, about almost everything at once.

It was called Hummingwhale Product Innovations — he and his close friend Ayush leading it, a couple of others alongside. The premise was naïve and Mirik knows it: they would innovate on anything, generate the intellectual property, and license it out. India, he’d learn the hard way, does not reward that model. But before the lesson landed, the products piled up.

They made a rewritable t-shirt. They made a more aerodynamic cricket bat — and didn’t just prototype it. They got aerodynamic modelling done so the edges wouldn’t carry to the slips; they put a subtle slant on it; they got it approved as a legal bat; and they put it in the hands of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Virat Kohli, Gautam Gambhir, Shreyas Iyer, Sanju Samson, Shahid Afridi.

Then there was the non-Newtonian fluid — the kind that turns solid under sudden pressure and stays liquid when you’re gentle with it. They built a water-park ride around it at Esselworld: a pool you’d sink into if you stood still, but could run across if you moved fast enough.

“There is a pool of fluid where, if you stand on it, you will dip — it’s a viscous fluid. But if you run fast on it, you can run across.”

It worked, and then it taught them everything they hadn’t thought about. The fluid settled fast, so they had to design the motor and impeller around it. Sachin Tendulkar came to inaugurate it. And a few days later, because the fluid was organic, it caught fungus and began to smell — a problem they eventually solved with salt.

In 2014, around the big election, they took the format of WWE trump-card games and made a political version — politicians rated on parameters like education and years served in government.

“My parents were more like — might as well follow it. If nothing happens, you are learning. There was never a ‘you need to start the business now, or come to the business.’ It was a natural progression.”

None of it scaled, and Mirik is clear-eyed about why. Each idea, to become a business, demanded total focus.

So in 2015–16, they shut it down. Financially it was roughly neutral. But the three or four years installed a reflex he’d lean on for the rest of his career.

“Because I reached out to everyone in the world. If I had an idea, I reached out to all the big companies — whether it’s a Slazenger in the UK or Mongoose Cricket in South Africa, wherever. The inhibition of just reaching out and hearing ‘no’ was not there.”

He’s careful about what the lesson was: the reaching out itself — treating the entire world as a set of people you could simply talk to.

“Rejection is fine — but you reach out. That, I think, was more critical. Talking to unknown people and just reaching out was a natural thing.”

Building the lab

In August 2016, a few months after winding down Hummingwhale, Mirik joined Aarti.

The first months were the obvious ones — understanding the business, getting to the base level. But he arrived with a fixed idea about where he wanted to push, and he started pushing almost immediately. In one of his first meetings, he argued that the company should build a dedicated pilot plant. It was the beginning of a years-long campaign.

The unglamorous work came first. He took the import-export data that sits publicly available online — hundreds of Excel sheets — and ground through it by hand, looking for products adjacent to Aarti’s capabilities that the company should be making.

“Now it seems trivial, in the days of AI. Copy all the Excel sheets, hundreds of them, do some analysis, and try to find the products that are relevant for the company. It was very early.”

He sat in on big deals without leading them — including a twenty-year supply agreement with a large corporate — and absorbed how senior people negotiated. One lesson, from his father, stuck hard enough that he repeats it as a rule:

“Any argument that you want to make, you should make before the contract is signed. Because the moment the contract is signed, it is signed. You might find it uncomfortable, and you can fight as much as possible — but before the contract is signed. Because once it’s signed, you have to assume it’s done.”

And the subtler half of it:

“In a good negotiation, everyone is not happy. That is critical.”

But his real project was the R&D centre. Indian chemical companies are not strangers to R&D — Aarti had had a function since the 1990s. But it was troubleshooting R&D: a team that fixes and extends the products already in the catalogue. Mirik wanted the other kind.

“Chlorination is something we know. Nitration is something we know. What is the most adjacent thing? That was the base on which the whole plan was built.”

It took years, and it took stagecraft — internal alignment first, then more stakeholders, then the question of where to build it.

A site at Jhagadia was approved, then reconsidered. They augmented the existing setup in Vapi. Then, during the Covid pandemic in 2020, they inaugurated the real thing: a roughly 50,000-square-foot R&D centre in Navi Mumbai, followed by a dedicated pilot facility to replace the makeshift one cobbled out of an old commercial plant.

Ask him where a chemistry-led R&D programme should hunt, and he starts past the obvious answer. Pharmaceutical chemistry gets the attention; the money, in his telling, hides in the middle of the catalogue.

“Pharmaceutical chemicals are the most innovative, but there is a bigger range of general speciality chemicals. Every concrete admixture will have some chemistry. Every polymer will have polymer additives. Any tyre will have rubber chemicals. Adhesives. Surfactants. Dyes and pigments is a big space. Even in pharma, if you take out the API — diagnostic chemicals is a space, contrast agents is a space. This may seem niche, but if you start adding them up, if you build a chemistry lens, you can start unlocking. But it also requires product thinking — to understand what to prioritise.”

The ambition runs past catching up. The first wave of projects took new starting materials — toluene where the company had run on benzene — and unlocked chemistries Aarti hadn’t owned. Not new to the world, he says; new to the company. The next phase is the harder one.

“My eventual vision is new-to-the-world. In India there will be very few examples of new-to-the-world.”

The philosophy behind the whole build is the stack again, dressed as corporate strategy: build R&D so that when an opportunity appears — one you couldn’t have predicted — you’re capable of catching it.

“You have to be capable. You have to absorb the opportunities when they’re presented to you. Suppose someone presents me with a brilliant opportunity, but I don’t have a technical team, I don’t have an R&D centre — what happens? The game you’re playing is, you have to be ready. Some of the things we are commercialising right now, we had never thought of at that time.”

He calls it building redundancy — human and technological capital, a smart team, the right tools — and he’s blunt that in India almost nobody underwrites that kind of uncertainty. The centre has started to pull the industry toward it: peers who had dismissed research as a cost line now come to see the building.

“Two or three of them have visited our R&D centre and their eyes opened up. Some of them wanted to work with IIT Bombay — they reached out, and we gave them guidance on how to work with academia. There is a change. But it is still too slow.”

That observation — capability exists, underwriting doesn’t — would, within a couple of years, become the seed of Spectrum Impact.

Forty courses

Mirik has read non-fiction obsessively for as long as he can remember — science, technology, the history of technology, for no reason other than that it fascinates him. Around 2018–19, the reading found a target.

The subject was climate. It was the era of the Paris Agreement and the first big waves of climate activism, and Mirik started at the periphery and then fell in. In 2019 he began taking online courses — and didn’t stop. Over roughly four years he worked through forty or fifty MOOCs, tracking them in an Excel sheet, writing out each week what he would learn next.

“In four years, I’ve done forty or fifty online courses. Genuine Excel sheets — every week I write out what to learn. It was all curiosity-driven.”

“Rutger Bregman is one of my favourite authors. His writings have influenced my thoughts and shaped my endeavour to work on climate change. His new book Moral Ambitions is now out. It was great to meet him at NYCW.”

The first was a deep course on climate from the University of Chicago, and it changed the altitude at which he understood the problem.

“It taught me a lot about what climate is at a science level, not at a general level. Why is carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas and oxygen not? That level.”

Then COVID arrived and handed him time. The courses were essentially free; he paid for them only as encouragement. He travelled — including a stretch in Europe around this period — and he reached out, cold-emailing climate people across the US and Europe. Two credentials opened the doors.

“When you say you’re an IIT Bombay alumnus, it has some weight. And when you say you’re part of Aarti Industries — a publicly listed, multi-billion-dollar company — people will actually listen. They’ll reply to an email.”

There was a second effect: very few people in India were talking about climate at all, and the outside world noticed. One of those international contacts — a man named Daniel — eventually introduced him to Gagan, the founder of the advanced-materials company that would become one of Spectrum’s defining bets.

A spectrum of capital

The raw material for an institution had been sitting in the family for years. In 2015, the Gogris — who had long done philanthropy and disaster-relief work, almost always without a name attached — set aside a pool of capital for giving. Then it sat.

“We as a family had allocated certain capital for donations — this was in 2015. But we were not doing anything about it. I was thinking: we have some capital allocated, might as well do something. And now this interest started to emerge in climate.”

“It was exactly ten years ago that we wrote the first cheque into the company. Their journey has been nothing short of inspirational. They have made energy efficiency mainstream.”

There had been investments before there was a thesis. Atomberg in 2015, and a few others — people from the IIT network, backed on trust.

“Those were not strategically linked to climate. When we invested in Atomberg, it was for energy efficiency — it made economic sense. It was not linked to the bigger climate. That was post facto.”

Which raised a question they argued about: whether to put a name on it at all. All six of them — his parents, his brother and sister-in-law, Mirik and his wife — debated it.

His mother put the family’s instinct plainly:

“You do the work — why do you want to name it?”

But the counter-argument won.

“Our thought was, if we don’t ground it on something, then it diffuses.”

An institution is a layer in the stack — something durable that other things can attach to. They named it Spectrum Impact, and the name was load-bearing in two directions. They would use a spectrum of capital — grants, equity, and debt — and they would work across a spectrum of areas, because climate refuses to sit in one box. None of it is a step away from Aarti — the company remains central to him — but he is not limited by it either. The ecosystem, he says, matters more.

Underneath the name sat a conviction Mirik states without hedging. Profit is not a dirty word in impact; it’s a tool — and so is its absence.

“You need the right tools for the right problems. Profits can solve a sizeable amount of problems. But there will be some problems that profits cannot solve — and that’s where grants have a critical place.”

“Climate Data is the ground truth on which any resilience plan gets built. Spectrum Impact has been supporting the Council on Energy, Environment and Water over the last few years to make the data more accurate, contextual and actionable.”

You can’t make a profit standardising EV-charging infrastructure, but somebody has to do it — grant work, funding the non-profits that help the government pick standards that will hold. Technology and business do most of the heavy lifting. Grants fill a gap. And debt is the tool he thinks India’s climate ecosystem misses most.

“I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Spectrum Impact and Rainmatter had 16 common organisations funded, in equity or grant.”

Accessibility, not affordability

This is where the years Mirik has spent on the plumbing of capital show.

Start with the shape of the problem. Climate, unlike software, is overwhelmingly physical and overwhelmingly B2B. Factories get built. Assets get bought. Working-capital cycles appear the moment you’re selling to other businesses. And that means debt is the tool that lets a real-world climate company scale at all.

“Apart from passenger EVs, a lot of climate is B2B. And when you have B2B, you automatically start having working-capital cycles. Asset-based leasing, factory debt — it becomes an important tool for you to scale.”

The thesis itself was built the way he prefers to build everything: by doing. Early on, the team drew up a plan to push EV adoption in India — passenger EVs, the obvious target. Then they argued themselves out of it. A private buyer may not drive enough green kilometres to quickly offset the larger upfront footprint of an EV; a commercial operator lives by sweating the asset. A private buyer gets a vehicle loan on his own credit standing; for a commercial operator, the income the asset generates is the basis of his ability to service the loan — underwriting the asset is what matters. So the plan turned to commercial vehicles, and the lending followed the logic.

“I had made a presentation — we want to encourage adoption of EVs in India. We had originally thought of passenger EVs. And then we were discussing — it didn’t make sense. A passenger is not looking at a payback on capex. But the commercial person has a different mindset. A lot of these learnings we got at that time. Thesis building — but thesis building by doing, rather than thesis building on paper.”

So Spectrum decided early to provide debt to young companies — and to solve for debt in a way that creates new business models and markets.

“Debt has two components. Is it accessible, or is it affordable?”

How they priced it is the counter-intuitive move. Most impact-minded lenders, he says, solve for affordability — they want to hand over money at 8% because it feels impactful. Spectrum decided to solve for accessibility instead, and to price debt high — in line with what the market would give next.

“People solve for affordability generally. They say, I want to give interest at 8%, because it’s impactful. We said no — we want to solve for accessibility, but not affordability. In fact, we were very clear we will not solve for affordability, as it would curtail the longer-term scale of the business model.”

The logic runs through what it means for a technology to be “solved.” A new solar technology isn’t solved when it works in a lab. It’s solved when it’s so tested and proven in the market that any bank will lend against it.

“The problem is solved when that technology is so tested and tried in the market that any bank will give debt on it. Someone can go to the bank and get 70% of the debt to put that solar panel up. That’s adoption. The end goal of any technology is that it has to be underwritable.”

Solar scaled when banks finally had enough data to believe the panel would work. Demand risk gone, technology risk gone — the maths started working.

Now hold that end-goal in mind and look at the trap. If an impact lender gives a young company creating new technology cheap 8% debt, it locks the company’s whole business model to a price that the real market — once the impact money runs out — will never match. The next lender prices the actual risk at 14%, and the model breaks.

It sounds harsh, but it is actually kind to the scale-up of the company: the logic runs the other way. By pricing near where the market will eventually sit, Spectrum’s capital becomes a bridge a company can walk across — 16%-plus, then a commercial lender at 14%, then 12%, then, eventually, a bank. The point was to make the company bankable and then leave.

“First plant, you may need to fund by equity. R&D, equity. Overhead, equity. But working capital — if you start taking equity for working capital, you’re screwed.”

You need the right capital stack for the right purpose.

The portfolio bears this out. Spectrum was the only supporter and debt provider to two EV-fintech startups that were facilitating loans for three-wheeler commercial EVs — and building a dataset on battery life for better underwriting models. It also lent to Infraprime, an early electric-truck OEM, when funds were needed to unblock supply-chain issues during Covid; Infraprime scaled, and was later acquired by Tube Investments. Nobody, including Spectrum, knew then how long the batteries would last. That was the point of lending.

“We were also not sure at that time — battery life, how much. But our whole process is: if you don’t do it, you will not get the data. Both the companies we worked with got financing from NBFCs and banks. Everyone has financed them. The data was based on the debt that we gave.”

And debt does something equity can’t: it changes the shape of a business. With a 1.5-to-2-year payback asset, debt lets a company stop selling boxes and start selling a service.

“Debt helps you change the business model. You go from an asset-selling business to a service model — so it’s easier for the final customer, because they’re not paying any capex to you, for a technology whose efficiency and longevity they may still not be willing to underwrite. Your deployment cycle becomes faster. At a 1.5-to-2-year payback, your sensitivity to the cost of the debt reduces — and scale depends on how much debt you can raise.”

Intello is his proof case: Spectrum helped move it to a leasing model, and it pivoted hard and is now doing well. The same logic runs through Biofuel Circle and through Ishitva.

There’s a structural complaint buried in here, and Mirik says it plainly: the venture-capital market isn’t built to underwrite companies that carry debt on their books, and that punishes the physical, scaling climate businesses India needs.

The relay race

If you want the single idea that sits underneath everything Mirik does, it’s here, and it comes from a story about his own family’s company.

Years ago, a petrochemical giant supplied Aarti with a critical raw material. Using it, Aarti developed the technology to make a specialty molecule for the first time in India. That, in turn, let an agrochemical company make a downstream product for the first time in India, which then became an export product.

“It’s a relay race across the stack. The petrochemical company makes the raw material. We made the molecule. The agrochemical company made the downstream product. Each one, without the other, doesn’t really work. It can’t.”

He also carries the counter-example, and it stings more because it sits in Aarti’s own catalogue. There is a high-strength fibre with defence applications whose two raw materials are both made in India — one of them by Aarti, which he says is the biggest producer outside China. Both chemicals are exported. The fibre is spun abroad and sold back to India.

“Both the raw materials are exported from India. He is making it and selling it back to India — and that too is a defence application. To do the whole process is tough. It’s R&D.”

The relay run, and the relay broken. The three runners are different kinds of company, and not one of them can succeed if the others don’t run their leg.

“Maybe one of them is only venture-fundable. Maybe the other is a family business. Maybe the other is an MNC. Three different roles — but all three are needed to make it succeed. One cannot exist without the other.”

So the real question is whose job it is to make sure all three show up to the same race.

Mirik’s word for that job is orchestration, and he thinks India is bad at it in a way that compounds.

“What China did well is — you either create an ecosystem so dense that there is national orchestration, or you have to be active, like what DARPA does.”

“The ARPA-E summit was genuinely impressive. Some remarkable research was presented — efficient manufacturing of high-temperature superconductors, supercritical CO2 turbines, niobium-based superalloys, muon-catalyzed nuclear fusion, an alternative pathway to photosynthesis. It was great to find opportunities to help scale some of the technologies.”

What he admires in the DARPA model is the design. He has been to the ARPA-E summit in the US and watched how it works: someone sits above the value chain and engineers the collaboration.

“They marry a coating company to a blade-designer company. That doesn’t happen in India. Who does it? So design thinking — orchestration — is the problem.”

India’s current answer, the RDI fund, frustrates him because it mistakes one layer for the whole stack. A fund-of-funds for startups is fine as a piece of the puzzle. But it leaves the core job — orchestration across the value chain — undone. And the mismatch goes deeper than structure: a fund manager needs his returns; a country needs its value chains.

“The incentive of the country has to be to nurture companies like Planet. But the investor who gets the RDI money will have different incentives, because they need to return the fund. The risk profile of a country is different. A VC needs the billion-dollar hockey stick. A country may not mind many small successful companies — because they are such enabling companies.”

The medical stack that saved a four-year-old; the chemistry value chain at Aarti; the grant-equity-debt capital stack; and, eventually, the country itself — they are all the same shape. Layers that have to exist, and someone who has to connect them so value can flow and each player can capture its share.

The missing public good

If orchestration is the diagnosis, Mirik has a concrete prescription for the single thing that would unlock the most: shared testbeds.

Suppose you have an idea for a new battery cathode and electrolyte. To prove it, you need a pilot facility. But a pilot facility for deep-tech chemistry costs 200 crore, and no early-stage startup can raise that to test one idea.

“To expect one startup to build this in a deep-tech space — it will require 200 crore. No chance. Zero chance. So this has to be built. It’s a public good.”

What India has almost none of, he says — and he has now looked across the board — is accessible piloting and prototyping infrastructure: facilities to de-risk in, the rung between a working idea and a fundable company.

He is no longer only prescribing. Mirik helped start ITRI — India’s Translational Research Initiative — a nationwide philanthropic effort to set up and strengthen translational research centres in the country’s leading research institutes: precisely the shared lab-to-market infrastructure he has been arguing for.

“A lot of companies are uninvestable because of these limiting factors. You can never justify building a piloting and prototyping facility to begin with.”

“If there is a pilot facility as a common good — you raise 2–3 crore, build some consumables, rent it for 50 lakh, and do it. Then the amount of innovation will skyrocket.”

Planet is his live example. The company has been able to pilot and prototype at ATIRA, the textile-research institute in Ahmedabad — imperfectly, he notes, but decisively.

“Even in the case of Planet — the role that ATIRA has played. There are some challenges with ATIRA, but in the end, you are able to do piloting and prototyping. If that machine you had to buy, Planet would be over.”

He has priced the whole prescription out. Perhaps 40–50 testbeds across the country would do it. A membrane testbed might cost 20–25 crore across three or four sub-facilities.

A solar one runs 50–60, because the prize there is next-generation chemistry: today’s silicon modules sit at 22% efficiency, perovskites promise 28% at almost the same capex — and the IISc and IIT Bombay groups working on them have nowhere to test at scale.

Agriculture needs its own, for phenotyping. A national programme, he reckons, could build all of it for 8,000–10,000 crore over four years.

“As a country, if you spend 8–10 thousand crores in four years, you can get all of this. Which is trivial. The value it generates — it’s a very critical bottleneck to solve.”

The model has to be government plus philanthropy plus grants, with industry giving not upfront cash but a commitment of use — and Spectrum is already funding pieces of it, including a membranes centre.

“The right way is to partner with the government. Industry should give a commitment of use — that, industry can give. You build the facility. This is the whole catch-22 in India: no one is building it.”

His Plan B is to stop waiting. He and a handful of other philanthropists may simply fund eight to ten testbeds themselves. Philanthropy can move in a few years where government processes might take ten. And, as he says about climate generally, the time-sensitivity is the whole point.

There’s a sibling problem to the testbed: the first commercial plant a new technology ever builds — the FOAK, in his shorthand. The plant, he says, that nobody wants to fund.

“The first-of-a-kind plant is the most risky. Once you get that running, everyone will come. Here, we took the call — our name is there, and we’re putting a big amount, so people follow. But who’s going to take that first risk? It’s a core bottleneck.”

His proposed fix is, again, a stack of capital — each layer priced for the risk it is bearing, so a first plant becomes financeable.

“You take the philanthropic capital — say 10% — and underwrite the whole thing, so they take the first loss. Then you put some equity on top. And 70% is still debt.”

Breakthrough did something like it in Europe, he notes. India hasn’t, and the shallowness of Indian capital markets makes it worse. The same gap is showing up in Spectrum’s newer interests: in geothermal, nobody knows who funds the first drill.

Those newer interests come from the same conviction that runs through everything he backs: efficiency is the smaller lever, generation is the core one.

The bets are Copenhagen Atomics, the Danish company building thorium reactors, and Quaise, which is drilling toward deep geothermal — baseload, the always-on power a grid needs underneath the solar and the batteries.

Section by section

Ask him about “the limiting factors in front of climate” and he refuses the premise before answering it.

“Climate has to be taken section by section. In solar, the limiting factors are completely different from something in, say, nuclear.”

Solar. The technology argument is over; today’s constraint is on the ground and in the paperwork.

“Technologically you are there — you have 22% efficiency. The issues now link around permitting and deployment. How fast you are able to deploy on the ground — that also has automation-related opportunities.”

There are reliability problems nobody owns. And beyond silicon sits the perovskite jump he wants testbeds for.

Storage. Lithium wins vehicles; he doubts it wins the grid.

“Lithium is a concentrated commodity. Eventually you will not be able to use lithium for grid — the numbers will not work out. You need to solve for sodium-ion. That is the most promising new innovation on the storage side.”

Trucks. Batteries will get there. The bottleneck is a mismatch in who decides.

“The decision of a truck is made by a truck operator. The decision of charging infra is made by the government.”

Even Musk, he points out, needed the state; the US charging network is thin regardless, and only China has solved it at scale. Which turns charging into a standardisation problem — and standardisation, in his taxonomy, is grant-and-government work, not equity work.

Shipping. The same theme, further out. Marine fuel will move from fuel oil toward methanol or ammonia; someone must pick the standard, and then every port needs bunkering built to it.

“Someone has to figure out that methanol is the standard. Then you have to correspondingly build all the bunkering at all ports. These are huge opportunities — but I don’t think it’s a startup opportunity. Large-scale chemical plants need to be built. A good opportunity for a company like Aarti. Not all things in the transition are innovations.”

Steel and concrete. The two he will not talk himself into.

“I have very high doubts on steel. I have been studying steel for some time — decarbonisation of steel is very challenging. They call it green steel now; they put everything in green. And concrete has fundamental challenges, because some of the CO2 is emitted in the reaction itself. How do you solve for that?”

“I had a course on the details of the blast furnace during engineering, but seeing a 2 million tonne per annum furnace live was an exhilarating experience. It also reinforced the scale of the challenge of steel decarbonisation.”

Efficiency. The overlooked section, and the one with the cleanest economics — when the buyer is rational.

“Energy efficiency in the end is a cost-saving play. Higher capex upfront, opex savings after. If the payback is under three or four years, it goes through. Energy efficiency for a rational consumer: very easy. For an irrational consumer: super difficult.”

B2B buyers run the arithmetic; households don’t, which is why fridges and ACs get sold on stars and branding. So Spectrum funds the layer behind the label — non-profits that work with the Bureau of Energy Efficiency on what the next five-star rating should demand. On that basis, he says, the whole country’s appliances get determined.

The engineering problems get solved — heat pumps arrive, batteries improve, costs fall. What doesn’t solve itself is the coordination: the permitting, the standards, the ports, the ratings. The stack again — and the missing layers are never the glamorous ones.

Food systems

For all the talk of solar and batteries, the bet Mirik gets most animated about is the one he says people don’t talk about: food.

His arithmetic here is about land and diets, and he runs it as a scenario.

“Let’s build a scenario: say you become 15% more efficient across the whole agri-value chain. The rest is still there — in fact, it will also increase, because as affluence increases, people are going more and more into a livestock-based diet, in China and India. You are still becoming efficient — and climate-wise, you are screwed.”

You can’t out-engineer what people want to eat; you have to match taste and texture exactly. But the prize is enormous, and it’s about the land more than the protein.

“If you’re able to get 40–50% of the land out of the food system — just getting it out — then the drawdown from the vegetation growing back will be so large that it will ensure our emissions peak and come back.”

Mirik is fixated on the drawdown — what brings the curve back down after the peak — and freed-up agricultural land, reforesting itself, is one of the few levers he rates large enough to matter. He spent a recent week running climate scenarios with AI to test it: where the peak lands matters less than what pulls the curve down after it.

His reasoning here follows a distinction he applies everywhere.

“This is the classic difference: do you solve for energy efficiency only, or for energy generation? Take the analogy to calories. Same in circularity — do you solve only for recycling, or also for mining? You do things efficiently, that’s fine, it’s good. But the big ugly problem is still at the calorie generation.”

Efficiency plays are real — Spectrum has food-wastage bets, GreenPod Labs among them — but they work at the edges. The core problem is where the calories come from.

So Spectrum has chased generation on two tracks. First, the technological route: it became a meaningful early funder of New Harvest, the cellular-agriculture non-profit in the US, supporting it through a critical phase.

Then the bigger, current bet — a sizeable position in a Bangalore-based alternative-protein company, still in stealth, so it goes unnamed here — solving for texture and taste first, and taking its product to the big European players to prove it.

“You really need to solve the texture, the taste, the consumption problem. They’re doing it for chicken — first you go for the most difficult problem, which is chicken. We should be able to do cost parity, with the right taste and texture. That’s the aim.”

The back end

“Aerogel is an ultralight material with extremely low density and thermal conductivity. This makes it useful for a variety of use cases, especially insulation. More efficient insulation leads to energy efficiency.”

There is a reason materials keep surfacing in this conversation: Mirik’s whole climate worldview rests on a single line.

“Climate is a material and energy problem at the end.”

And materials, he argues, are systematically underrated for a structural reason: they sit at the back of every value chain, where nothing is visible and nothing is exciting.

“All the big, important problems are the ones that are actually behind the scenes. The visible problems are the ones everyone gets excited about — but those are not the problems that matter. That’s why materials are always at the back end. That’s not the problem that gets people excited.”

The robots, the space-tech companies, the things investors do get excited about — a lot of them, he says, are materials stories wearing a more glamorous costume. Maybe the real innovation in a launch company is an alloy that holds methane and oxygen together at temperature; the investors will hear the story about space. Which is why the bets are less crowded — and why he hunts there.

“Even till today, I don’t know any lightweighting material company in India apart from Planet. NoPo Nanotechnologies is the only indigenous technology for single-walled carbon nanotubes that I know. It’s not like everywhere there’s a plethora of options.”

This is the lens he brought to Planet, the advanced-materials company Daniel had introduced him to. From day one, Mirik told its founder Gagan one thing, and repeated it until it stuck.

“The first thing I told Gagan on day one: you have to be a materials company. You cannot be a truck.”

The machine in the column

Mirik is unworried about AI’s energy appetite, and enthusiastic about what it does for hard-tech. His favourite proof point happened inside Aarti.

“One 27-year-old, who had no idea of coding, built a digital twin of a distillation column. From that correlation we were able to change the ratios of steam required. Effectively we’re saving crores a year — and more interestingly, that means coal is not being used. Direct climate impact.”

On the worry that AI will gobble the grid: the panic, he says, is an American panic. The US grid has been flat for decades and suddenly has to grow. India and China have been building generation the whole time, and can ride the wave. And the companies driving the new demand are the ones best placed to pay for what comes next.

“Big tech are generally pro-climate. They are able to pay for a geothermal plant, a nuclear plant — so they will actually help de-risk broader climate technologies. A one-gigawatt data centre might cost 50 billion; the energy is maybe 2 or 2.5 billion of that. They will be happy to do that. Google will actually help usher in the next energy transformation.”

Fervo, the geothermal company, has Google as a partner — his case in point. His real worries sit elsewhere. One is water: data centres concentrate their draw in already water-stressed regions, and he thinks that becomes the bigger issue. The other is livelihoods, especially India’s service jobs. On the climate ledger, though, he files AI firmly under positive.

What he backs

Ask what he looks for in a founder and he starts with the problem.

“The first thing is the problem-statement identification. ‘This is the problem I want to solve.’ That’s how you’re working.”

Behind that sits a map he built during the forty courses, and it does most of his filtering before a founder finishes the first sentence.

“You have a list of where the emissions are coming from — 51 billion tonnes. It is very well documented: energy allocates this much, food is this much, materials is this much. Then for all of these emissions, the next level is: what are the high-level solution spaces? And in the solution spaces you start realising new problems — base load versus renewable — and that becomes the next solution set. So the decision of what a person is solving — you can literally know in the first line.”

The map produces red lines as well as green ones. Some pitches end in the first sentence.

“Someone is telling me the hydrogen story — I have a very strong thesis on hydrogen, because I know the first principles. Someone tells me, ‘I will put hydrogen in a car.’ I say you shouldn’t. Whether it’s internal combustion or fuel cells, I am very clear it’s not making sense to me. I will not invest in that. You automatically start getting the red lines.”

India, he thinks, has spent years riding the hydrogen narrative while the depth underneath goes unbuilt. And the same map produces instant conviction when the physics is on the founder’s side.

“No one came to convince me of lightweighting. The importance of lightweighting is about energy efficiency — whenever there is energy efficiency, the problem lends itself first. Then, if someone comes with a lightweighting idea, you benchmark. You double-click. What is the basic technical logic?”

“Efficient heat transfer is maybe one of the most underappreciated properties of a system. Using material science, if the heat can be dissipated better it becomes an enabling technology that unlocks functionality that wasn’t available earlier.”

Because the spaces Spectrum plays in aren’t crowded the way SaaS is, he can take riskier, deeper bets. He has the technical conversation and reads the papers. And he’s scathing about the gap this exposes in the ecosystem.

“There’s nobody in the venture capital ecosystem who understands this at that level — or who’s willing to go deep enough. So it’s a black box for most of them.”

Ten years late

Underneath the portfolio sits a conviction about time.

“Say you solve poverty ten years late. That’s obviously not good. You solve child mortality ten years late. But the problem with climate is — if you solve it ten years late, you are screwed much, much more. Because of the time-sensitive nature of the problem.”

The reason is the physics of thresholds.

“You have these peaks in the climate which can trigger tipping points — which will be irreversible problems. Once your West Antarctic ice sheet gets melted, and Thwaites glacier has a problem, that doesn’t mean you can come back.”

He is, on the evidence, calm about the worst case — he has read enough to believe the system self-corrects short of catastrophe.

What makes the deadline harder is that nobody can meet it alone, and the game is built to punish whoever moves first.

“You can’t — because if you move first and China doesn’t, they are better off. If neither does it, both are better off than moving alone. Statistically speaking, the best solution is that both should do it. It usually doesn’t happen.”

Game theory is one of his favourite subjects and he reads the climate stalemate as a live prisoner’s dilemma. Where he finds hope is in whoever breaks the price logic rather than the politics.

“China is the only big green shoot in the whole system. They are able to reduce the cost of so many of these things that it becomes viable suddenly, everywhere in the world, to get green energy — including India.”

Europe helps through regulation. America, in his reading, helps by accident.

“The only good thing in the US is it is too capitalistic — if your solutions are good, eventually they will adopt. Texas is the biggest wind and solar in the US. And green became cool because of a branding exercise around Tesla. They know marketing well.”

Two refusals keep his thinking clean here. The first is the Indian habit of folding climate into air pollution.

“Half the time when I talk about climate, it’s Delhi air pollution. It’s not climate. Obviously it’s related — I’m not saying it’s not. But you can solve the climate problem and still have an air pollution problem. You can become net zero and still have air pollution.”

The second is the idea that transition costs are a reason not to transition. He takes the livelihoods question seriously — coal communities, dairy farmers, everyone downstream of the old stack — and answers it as a design problem.

“My question will not be, ‘What happens to the community?’ My question will be, ‘What do I do to ensure that the community transitions in a good way?’ But I will still have to do the transition. When the ozone layer — you actually paid people not to make the chemicals. You can have a transition plan. And even after that, if there is a gap, you do direct cash transfer.”

The engineering problems, he keeps saying, will get solved. The coordination problems are where the decade gets lost.

The binding constraint - judiciary

The longer you talk to Mirik, the more every specific problem — R&D, health, manufacturing, climate — resolves into the same root. He’s emphatic that these are symptoms, and the disease is deeper.

“At the core level, at the hyper-abstraction level — trust. Low trust, resulting in low cooperation. It starts from the system.”

His sharpest illustration is a challenge he poses like a riddle: name one joint venture between two Indian private companies. Not public-sector, not a multinational pairing — two Indian private firms, sharing risk.

“Think about it. That is a symptom of the fact that India is such a low-trust system. Because of the judicial issues, you have such a low-trust system that there are economic problems in your collaboration.”

And so the judiciary, of all things, becomes his candidate for the country’s true binding constraint: contracts are how strangers cooperate at scale, and a contract is only worth the speed and certainty of its enforcement.

“A country growing is cooperation between strangers. Without a very clear, dynamic judiciary, you will not be able to scale cooperation between strangers. Money scales cooperation to one level — but for the next level, you need to enforce contracts. Every contract in India, you’re scared of.”

Worse than slow, he argues, is slow and corrupt, which tilts the field to whoever can outlast the other side — and pushes companies to vertically integrate, trusting no outside partner, until they hit a ceiling they can’t grow past.

“India’s key institutional legacies — the bureaucracy, the judiciary — are effectively a continuation of the British. They were not meant to empower the people.”

And it’s of a piece with everything else — because a country, in his telling, is just the largest stack of all, and India’s missing layer is the one that lets strangers trust each other.

Build the highway, not the mall

Spectrum is entering its second phase, and Mirik describes the shift without much ceremony. Phase one built the network and deployed a spread of early capital. Phase two is about doubling down on the ones that are working — Planet, Biofuel Circle, Cityflo — rather than spreading thin, partly because India doesn’t yet generate enough hardcore deep-science startups to keep spraying bets at.

One suggestion reaches him regularly: turn the track record into a fund-of-funds — use Spectrum’s name to raise from other families, patient, risk-literate capital that understands physical risk from the inside.

His answer is no. He doesn’t want to take anyone’s capital — not now, and not in any future scenario — because outside money takes away the flexibility that is the whole design of deploying the family’s own.

“A lot of people told me years ago: we will not have the flexibility we have if I take anyone else’s capital.”

But he also knows the thesis can’t scale on Spectrum alone.

“I keep telling people there should be more Spectrums. But a very specific set of things came together for us — the technical background, the manufacturing background, the different tools in our toolkit. It’s not very scalable.”

What would convince the family offices, he thinks, is proof — a few B2B climate-manufacturing IPOs coming out of India in the next four or five years, so the conversation changes from theory to precedent: people invested in climate early, and they got through.

“Interestingly, the discovery of the electron required a collaboration between J. J. Thomson and the most advanced glass blower in Cambridge. The importance of having an ecosystem that can help scientists to further technology has only grown.”

Spectrum is also widening from climate into translational research as a whole — the missing testbeds, the building blocks — funding eight to ten centres across IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IISc and IIT Delhi. Health, he says, will be the big one beyond climate.

The design principle underneath it: India keeps funding the finished product, he argues, when the scarce thing is the components everyone will need. Map twenty problems against twenty components and you get a many-to-many web; fund the components.

“Figure out the critical building blocks. ‘I want to solve for membranes’ is different from ‘I want to solve for dialysis’ — membrane goes into dialysis. So I’m not solving for a missile — I’m solving for an alloy here, a combustion chamber there. Then whoever’s making the missile can access all three.”

It is the relay race again, turned into a blueprint. Build the shared layers — the membranes, the alloys, the sensors, the testbeds — and let entrepreneurs assemble the products on top.

“The entrepreneur is going to make the product. The system has to be enabling the entrepreneur to make the product. We’re making a highway. We’re not the only shop in the mall.”

Ask him what the next decade of Spectrum looks like and he won’t give you a tidy five-year vision; he never really has, and he says they were more organic about it than structured.

Energy and materials, he’ll tell you, are the two big things, because they’re the same thing — and food, because of the land. Beyond that: build the capability, stay early, and be ready to catch the opportunities you can’t yet see.

What he wants, in the end, is for the country to learn to build and connect its layers — to orchestrate — so that value can flow between strangers who’ve learned, at last, to trust each other. He’s decided to spend his life building the missing layers anyway, on the bet that someone has to go first.

“The first-of-a-kind is the most tricky. Who’s going to take that risk? In this case, we are making the move.”

Safe Harbor Statement: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial, or legal advice, nor a recommendation to buy or sell any security. It contains forward-looking statements and personal opinions that involve risks and uncertainties; actual outcomes may differ materially. Figures described as directional or order-of-magnitude are the subject’s own estimates and have not been independently audited. Readers should conduct their own due diligence.

This story is based on extensive interviews with Mirik Gogri of Spectrum Impact. This is NOT a paid article.

"Don't fix your problem during the coursework. If somebody is joining with me even today, I never give them a problem. I say — these are the areas. Go through the literature. Because if the guide gives the problem, that's not correct. The passion has to originate from the student's own mind. Otherwise I may be interested in it, but the student may not be."

Students arrive at a PhD wanting to be told what to solve. Most guides oblige. The problem gets solved, a paper gets published, a position is secured, a promotion follows. Somewhere in that sequence, the question of whether any of it mattered to anyone outside the lab gets skipped.

“If we can identify the right problem, eighty percent of your work is over.”

He goes further than that. A student who spends an entire year choosing the problem has, in his accounting, wasted nothing.

“If you spend one year to identify the problem, no problem. It is not a waste. That is the most important part.”

This is the rule he has lived by since the 1980s, when he left a Kerala village that had only recently received electricity and went looking for a subject that would hold his attention for the next forty years. He found it in polymer composites — the branch of material science currently rebuilding aircraft wings, satellite fairings, wind turbine blades and the interior panels of new cars.

He found his way, eventually, to the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram, where he helped build the chemistry department from scratch. He has been there nearly twenty years. He now serves as the institute’s Pro-Vice Chancellor.

A box of facts

A village with no electricity

Kuruvilla Joseph was born in Kottayam, Kerala. He remembers the year electricity reached his house. It was 1980.

"In our house, electricity — we got it fully only in the 1980s, when I had completed my 10th standard. And that was not only me. That was the situation all over the state."

He was ten in 1975, fifteen in 1980. Everything before then happened by kerosene lamp.

His schooling began the way schooling had begun in that part of Kerala for generations. Before any formal school, a traditional teacher would sit with the child and teach them to form their first letters. It went on for about a year. At the end of that stage came a small ceremony, a convocation with its own Malayalam name. Today, he says, you would call it an initiation.

"Every family knew every other family. Not only nearby — I am saying within a radius of three, four, five kilometres. The village knew each other."

The roofs of most houses were thatched with coconut or palm leaf, and the thatch had to be replaced every year or two. That work, like almost everything else, was done collectively. If a family had a wedding, a large crowd assembled on its own — cooking, bundling, raising the shamiana. No one had to be invited. No one had a phone.

"If there was a death in a family, all would come. No telephone, nothing like that. No telegram — that was also very difficult. But they would volunteer. One would say — I will go to this place. Another would say — I will go to that place. And everybody knew that this relative was coming. That is the kind of association life."

He repeats the phrase several times during the conversation. Association life. The school worked the same way. It is the thing, he thinks, that Indian childhoods have since lost.

"Very close association life was there. That is what is missing now. People have become very, very within the family. I don't know that much affection is there. The relations between neighbours and siblings — those are really missing. And now unwanted competition is also there."

The village was poor; he treats that as plain fact. The loss he keeps returning to is the unwanted competition that came later — absent in the years when every roof needed the same shared labour.

He completed his plus two in 1982. Software, the default for a bright Indian student today, did not exist as a career. One of his brothers had just finished an MSc in chemistry and pointed him toward the same path, for the job opportunities.

"We were looking for some kind of job. So chemistry."

The thread that formed in midair

For his MSc he went to St. Berchmans College in Changanassery — a Kottayam-district institution he describes as one of the best chemistry colleges in South India, and one that recently celebrated its centenary. It is also where his working life would keep returning: he would later teach there, twice, between everything else.

During his first year of MSc, he had his first moment of real wonder in a lab.

"There was a National Industrial and Science Exhibition. One of my teachers asked me to put up a stall on polymers. We did a demonstration of interfacial polymerization. You take two chemicals that do not mix. There is a phase separation — you can see the interface between them. You put a glass rod at the interface, and as you pull it up, the two chemicals meet at the boundary and react. Whenever they come in contact at the interface, they form nylon."

He is describing the nylon rope trick. Two liquids that will not mix — one a diamine, the other a dicarboxylic acid — sit in the same beaker. A thin, continuous strand of nylon forms where they meet, and you can wind it out of the liquid like thread off a spool.

The polymer forms only where the two liquids touch. Pulling exposes fresh boundary, so the thread keeps forming for as long as you keep winding.

In a small college exhibition in the mid-1980s, watching a thread form in midair out of two liquids, Kuruvilla Joseph decided polymers were the field. Polymer science barely existed in India then. He has stayed in it for forty years.

Looking for Selvam

His PhD was jointly supervised by Prof. Sabu Thomas — then at the newly formed Mahatma Gandhi University, now one of India's most cited polymer scientists — and Dr. C. Pavithran at the Regional Research Laboratory in Thiruvananthapuram, later renamed CSIR-NIIST. The arrangement itself tells you something about the period. The university was so new that its facilities were minimal, so the two institutions struck up a joint programme, and Kuruvilla Joseph did most of his experimental work at RRL, which had the instruments.

Dr. Pavithran's group worked on composites, and the young researcher started on natural fibres — sisal and jute. This was the early 1990s, and by his estimate ninety percent of the composite work in the country was being done with thermosets: epoxy, polyester, phenolic resins. He wanted to work on thermoplastic composites instead. The equipment for blending thermoplastics did not exist in the lab. There was no Brabender, no proper blending machine at all.

"You have only one hand-held extruder. You won't believe — I did this thermoplastic work on that."

"I was really curious. And in those days, the fellowships and all were very, very small."

Curiosity was the budget. And Kerala, it turned out, did not grow sisal commercially. Someone told him there was a man in Chozhangar, near Marthandam in Tamil Nadu, who produced it. The man's name was Selvam. Kuruvilla Joseph, with no phone number and no address, got on a bus and started asking.

"I finally somehow found his house. His wife said — he has gone to the mala, the mountain, to cut the leaves."

A boy from the village walked him up the mountain to the plantation. When he found Selvam, he was told the fibre had already been sold. If he wanted some, he should go on — there was another man selling it in a village near Tirunelveli, farther down the state.

He got on another bus.

"When I reached the village near Tirunelveli and took a photo, somebody knew this fellow. And when we went to the village and met the guy, they were very, very generous. Very poor people in a village. They gave me banana and water, and collected the fibre for me. When I saw the fibre, I was really excited. If I tell this today, you won't understand."

He laughs at the last line. A PhD student today would order the fibre online and have it delivered in two days. The hunt is part of why he knew the material — where it grew, who cut it, what it cost the people who lived off it.

"Whatever suffering I went through in those days — that made my theoretical and practical knowledge very strong. When I was trying to do things myself, lots of problems would happen. I was trying to solve those problems, discussing with others. That is what made it strong."

The habit stayed with him. Decades later, when he advises PhD students, he tells them the same thing: the difficulty is the teacher. Identifying a problem is most of the work; running the experiments is technique.

The company he almost started

During the same period came the regret he still carries.

He had developed a thermoplastic composite with properties good enough that a visiting team from industry came to see it. Two of them, in the middle of the visit, stood up and asked him directly whether he was ready to transfer the technology.

He was a research student. He was not ready for anything of the kind.

"I missed that. I really missed. In fact, by that time I had even registered a company. Even today I have that letter in the drawer."

The technology eventually reached the market — but not through him. The commercial version of that composite, he says, is now sold widely. He had the science and the paperwork and nothing else: no co-founders, no industrial partners, no idea how to price, sell, or scale. The incorporation certificate sits in a drawer as proof that the idea was his first.

It is a story that surfaces often in Indian research — a scientist with a working prototype and no ecosystem to launch it into. He does not linger on it, but he returns to the lesson several times in the conversation. Research institutes and industry have to be built next to each other, not at different ends of a city.

Thirty-five lakhs, 1993

After his PhD, he went looking for a job. He found an unusual one.

Nirmithi — the National Institute of Habitat Technology — had just been set up in Kerala, focused on low-cost materials for construction. In 1993 he joined the effort to build its laboratory from nothing. The work began, characteristically, with a problem-finding exercise: a brainstorming session with experts from the IITs and from industry on which conventional building materials could be replaced, and with what.

"We had a very good meeting, and based on that I set up a laboratory. I still remember — in 1993, 35 lakhs of instruments, if I'm correct. Thirty-five was a good amount then."

(Editor: At the rupee's purchasing power that year, comparable to roughly Rs 1.5–2 crore today.)

He started work on fly ash composites, natural fibre composites, alternative building materials. But the institute was new, his position was not permanent, and a tenured lectureship opened up at St. Berchmans — the college where he had done his MSc. He took it.

"The management was very, very helpful. They supported me. I created a lot of research facilities there. I got extramural projects. Many research students. Internship students. I was enjoying the life."

I was enjoying the life. He says that sentence more than once in the interview, each time about the period just before a move. In his career, contentment has been the signal that a change is coming.

Filament sheets in Luleå

In 1998, the first change came: a post-doctoral position in Brazil.

"The Brazilians were really interested in my work. Because Brazil is a country with huge natural resources. A lot of natural fibres. Very good in composites. In many places, many industries. I had a lot of interesting collaboration. That also made me very strong in theory and practice — in composites in general."

He worked in Brazil, came back to the college, then around 2000 took a second post-doc in Sweden — at Luleå University of Technology, working closely with ABB Plast in Piteå, up near the Gulf of Bothnia. ABB Plast was a manufacturer, exporting composite products across Europe — among them refrigerated shipping containers, built by resin transfer moulding.

"We were real manufacturers of composites, exporting the product. We could go and see the process. We could take a sample, test it. The exposure was excellent."

What struck him hardest was the scale of one particular technique.

"Filament winding — most of us, when we hear it, will think of a cylindrical tubular structure. No. They were making big filament-wound sheets. Huge sheets. Huge industrial composite structures, totally insulated. And they could machine them. In those days, they were exporting all of it."

He took photographs of the machines. He keeps them still, and offers to show them to any visitor to the institute.

There was a second lesson from that stretch of Europe. By the late 1990s, European and Japanese car interiors — door panels, parcel shelves, boot liners — were routinely made of natural fibre composites: hemp, flax, kenaf or jute bonded into a polymer matrix. The fibres he had hunted across Tamil Nadu by bus were, in other economies, an industrial input with a supply chain.

"If you take any automobile, the inner parts are made of natural fibre composite. Household appliances and everything. A huge industry is looking for natural-fibre-based composites. That is what is happening in other countries."

He returned to the same college in Kottayam, but with a working picture of how a composites industry actually runs at scale — the processes, the equipment, the integration between research and manufacturing. It became the reference point he carried for the rest of his career.

"The research talent in India is very good. We have brilliant students. But the outlook is the problem."

The signature

IIST was announced in 2007 as India's first university dedicated to space science and technology — an initiative of the Department of Space under then-Chairman Dr. G. Madhavan Nair. Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was named its Chancellor. Its first director was Dr. B.N. Suresh.

Kuruvilla Joseph, by then, had a good life exactly where he was.

"In those days, I had many PhD students and internship students. It was close to my house also. Many students, school students, were coming there, doing internships. I was enjoying the life. Then this advertisement of IIST appeared."

He inquired. His senior colleagues talked him out of it.

"They said — no, no, they are looking for people from outside India. This is a very prestigious institute. Kalam is going to be the Chancellor. So I lost my hope. I didn't apply."

His own PhD students did not accept that. They filled in the application on his behalf and brought it to him on the last day.

"They said — either you apply, or we will apply for you. Let us try. At the last minute, I signed and sent the application."

Then a call came: a screening interview in Bangalore. He told his family he was not going — he was happy where he was, so why should he? His family overruled him.

IIST offered him a flight ticket; he left it unbooked until it was too late to matter, and the day before the interview he took a bus from Kottayam to Bangalore instead.

"I was very cool. I am not going to get it."

Only later did he learn there had been more than a hundred applicants for the position.

He got the job.

IIST began operations from a temporary facility. In August 2010, it moved to its permanent campus at Valiamala, outside Thiruvananthapuram — and by the time the institute moved, the proposals he had written and the instruments he had procured were waiting.

"In 2010, when we moved to this campus, everything was in place."

He calls that day one of the proudest of his career.

"2010, August 15."

He remembers the date.

Kalam's follow-ups

A personal note. Like many Indians of my generation, I found Dr. Kalam before I found science — I bought Wings of Fire as a boy and it rearranged something: it said it does not matter where you start. I have asked everyone I have met who worked with him what he was actually like, and I have never once heard a different account. Kuruvilla Joseph's is no exception, but his is more specific than most.

Kalam attended the governing body meetings at IIST. He visited the campus repeatedly in the years after the move to Valiamala. He gave lectures. And he assigned work.

"He was supporting everyone, and he was monitoring. Not only that — he would not simply say something and go. Next time, he will ask: what happened to that? Whether you did it, whether you did not."

Most people at that level say things and move on; no one expects them to remember. Kalam remembered. The people around him learned, quickly, not to propose anything they were not prepared to deliver.

One of his standing instructions, as Kuruvilla Joseph recalls it, was that the institute should build Centres of Excellence wherever its faculty already had real strength. From the chemistry side, Kuruvilla Joseph presented the case for a Centre for Nano Science and Technology — not just the theory, but what the laboratory itself would look like. Kalam heard it, backed it, and asked about it again on his next visit.

Asked how he built the chemistry department, Kuruvilla Joseph will not talk about himself in the first person. He credits two people first — G. Madhavan Nair, then Chairman of ISRO, and B.N. Suresh, the founding director — and reaches for a metaphor from his own field.

"In composites, we used to say: one plus one is more than two. But in a composite of fibre and matrix, you get a synergetic property."

The strength of the pair exceeded the sum of the parts. I extended the metaphor: one plus one equals eleven. He laughed, and accepted it.

The first five years at IIST were spent writing proposals, procuring instruments, hiring, and running the chemistry courses. The institute was small. He had enough freedom to build the research infrastructure the way he wanted it — and a Chancellor who would check.

The three drivers

He has been inside Indian research for forty years, and he has a short, direct diagnosis of what is wrong with it.

"Look at what Indian research is for. A PhD is for three or four Ps. One — I am doing research, publishing a paper, that is very important. The second P — for getting a position. For a college lectureship or an assistant professorship, a PhD is a must. Another P — for promotion. So this is a position-oriented, promotion-oriented, paper-oriented research culture. That is killing it."

The problem, he says, is that most students never ask what the research is actually for. The guide hands them a problem. They solve it. They publish. They graduate. They never visit a factory. They never meet a customer.

"Seventy percent of people just want to get a PhD with some publications. They are not thinking about application. Recently that is changing. But still — seventy percent."

The remainder — twenty, maybe thirty percent, by his reckoning — are in it for the thing itself. His prescription for the rest is blunt.

"Actually speaking, applied research should be linked to the industry."

His entire method as a supervisor is built around that linkage, and it begins with the refusal that opens this article: he will not hand out problems.

"I tell them — these are the areas. Go through the literature. Because if the guide gives the problem, that's not correct. The passion has to originate from the student's own mind."

And the students need to see industry early. Not at the end of the PhD, when they are looking for jobs. At the beginning — before the problem is even chosen, because the problem should come out of that contact.

"When a student is joining with a guide, it is only guide and student and institute. Maybe he or she is going for some conference — that is all, over and done. They are not getting any industrial exposure. This exposure should happen at the beginning of the research. Not at the end."

"Fixing the problem is most important. If we can identify the right problem, eighty percent of your work is over."

Most research manuals treat problem identification as a preliminary step before the real work begins. He treats it as the work — and he splits what remains into exactly two parts.

"That is the most important part. The second part is the doing of the work — anybody can do that. If I have a lab assistant, I can ask him to make a composite, and he will do it. And then there is the interpretation of the results, where we need a very good theoretical background."

Choosing the question, and reading the answer. Everything in between, in his division of labour, is technique.

His second fix is physical: bring industry onto the campus.

"The industry should come to the campus. There should be an industrial park. Industry should totally associate with the institution. They should know, and they should guide. When you are doing research as a PhD student, an industry guy should be there as a guide. That's why the UGC introduced the Professor of Practice scheme. But it is not happening effectively in many institutions."

He wants the flow to run both ways. Faculty and students should work inside industrial plants — not a one-day factory visit, but real time embedded in the process. Industry people should hold formal roles inside the lab, shaping problems before they are chosen. The regulators have already built the framework, he points out. The framework is not being used.

What ISRO got right

He has spent two decades inside an ISRO institution, and he thinks ISRO solved the problem that Indian academic culture has not.

"That is what I call the ISRO culture. The interdisciplinary approach and the review mechanism. Everyone attending the review understands what is happening, and the review sets a timeline for the next review. Time-bound delivery. When a launch is declared, the scientists are dedicated one hundred percent. They forget family. Twenty-four by seven, from top to bottom of the hierarchy, they are working as a team. There is no ego clash. That is the success. I have personally experienced it."

The specific mechanism he admires — and has spent years importing into IIST — is that ISRO does not lock scientists into the discipline they were hired for.

"A scientist may join as a chemical engineer. Over a period of time, he or she is getting expertise in structures, in propellants, even in avionics. And after some time, he or she may be heading another entity altogether. That is ISRO practicing the interdisciplinary approach from the beginning."

At IIST, the same open borders are built into the degree. Undergraduates carry nine credits of curricular and extracurricular work outside their home discipline, and can take minors across departments. Students spend day and night in the satellite laboratory building real components for real missions — cloud-tested, flight-bound, not classroom exercises.

"This type of field learning process is very, very important."

He tells the story of one undergraduate — an aerospace engineer by training, a discipline whose graduates are expected to end up in structures, thermal or propulsion. The student drifted instead into IIST's remote sensing group, got his exposure there, and after graduating ended up at one of the country's leading private space startups.

"We don't know where and how it is going to spark on your mind. We need to give exposure to all areas wherever possible. That is it."

The model produces hardware as well as careers. The Government of India, he notes, is now explicit that research innovation should be linked to industry, and IIST has a growing list of examples built with industrial and academic collaborators.

The example he cites: a costly instrument India had been importing — an atomic layer deposition system, which lays coatings a few atoms thick on parts like precision bearings — recently built in India through such a collaboration.

No problem, no innovation

Underneath the institutional argument sits a more personal theory of how engineers are actually formed. It is the same theory that made him grateful, not resentful, about hunting sisal on foot.

"The classroom teaching is to strengthen their theory. Theory should be appropriately practiced. When you are doing the practice, only problems will come. Those problems are the real driving force for all innovations. If there is no problem, there are no innovations."

Problems, for him, are the raw material. Theory turns into capability only by meeting them.

"The problem must be there. More important is how you are going to tackle the problem. That is where you need a system engineering concept — breaking down the problem, just as in finite element analysis. Breaking the problem into small pieces and building up. Once there is a problem, people don't know how to address it."

At IIST the students run a programme called Tomorrow's Engineers, built around exactly this: system engineering — breaking a problem too big to solve into pieces small enough to solve. That skill, he says, is the real gap in Indian engineering education.

And when he wants a live example of the theory, he points at the other end of the video call.

"Gagan entered this industry. He may be facing a lot of problems. He is trying to solve those problems, and after solving them, new problems will come. These problems are the driving forces, and innovation will come."

Later in the call he returns to the same example and completes it.

"He is having the idea. He is implementing it. At the implementation and execution level, he is undergoing a lot of problems. He has to troubleshoot all these problems. But the experience he is getting is tremendous — we cannot imagine it. So we should have an ecosystem where the students, the industry, the academicians are sitting together, working together."

Future is composite

Ask him what the next fifty years of materials look like and he answers in one line.

"Future is composite."

The argument runs on two facts. The first is tailorability.

"The good thing is, I can tailor the product."

A metal gives you the properties it has. A composite gives you the properties you design — you choose the fibre, the matrix, the layup, the process, and you get a material tuned to the load case. The second fact is specific strength: a metallic structure is strong but heavy, and once you divide strength by weight, composites win almost everywhere it matters. Aircraft are moving toward all-composite airframes. Marine applications prefer composites because they do not corrode. Carbon fibre, Kevlar and new epoxies are remaking aerospace and automotive, and in the last few years household goods — bicycle frames, sports equipment, consumer products.

India's problem sits one step upstream: the country does not make the raw material.

"The challenge is that we don't have a good carbon fibre manufacturing unit in India. We are trying, even today."

(Editor: A few Indian players run small carbon fibre lines, but aerospace-grade supply is almost entirely imported. By the research group’s count, perhaps ten countries manufacture carbon fibre, and three to five do most of it at industrial scale.)

His research group is working on one answer — low-cost, high-performance carbon fibres made from natural resources, as an alternative to the petroleum-derived precursors the industry standardised on. And he puts a number, flagged as a guess, on the scale of the dependency.

"I'm not exact, I don't know — but I imagine that almost sixty percent of the composite industry is import-dependent."

The exact figure matters less than the pattern. Indian composites manufacturing depends on imported fibres, imported resins and imported machinery. Cut any one of those links and production stops.

The second thing he wants Indian composites to do is get smarter. It is where his own group works.

"Smart composite materials. Lightweight, smart, self-healing."

A smart composite responds to an external stimulus — light, heat, an electric or magnetic field — by changing shape, stiffness or some other property. A self-healing composite repairs itself.

"Suppose I have a structure made of composite. A crack appears. Automatically, it heals. Otherwise the crack will slowly start propagating, and finally the system will fail."

His group has built several pieces of this. The work now runs from advanced multifunctional composites to bio-derived materials — a broad front, with one recurring theme.

The group took on one of the oldest trade-offs in the field. Epoxy is brittle. Add a conventional toughening agent and the strength and modulus fall. They wanted all three at once.

"I want to keep the strength and modulus, and at the same time improve the toughness. That was the challenge."

The group's route: take a carbon material — graphene oxide, say, or carbon nanotubes — and modify it by grafting. The resulting composites perform better across the board. The research did not stop there. It went deeper — into the role of materials and their interfaces in epoxy systems, into block copolymer modifications, and into several grafting strategies for toughening, with improvements of 200 to 300 percent. The same mechanisms are now being tested in bio-based epoxy systems, with sustainability as the central focus. Dr. Saritha and Dr. Deeraj led the design and execution of these projects.

"Excellent toughening. Up to 300% improvement in the toughness of epoxy."

The group also developed carbon fibres in the laboratory from commercially viable, reliable precursor sources — lightweight, flexible fibres that shield electronics from electromagnetic interference.

The current frontier is functional materials. Epoxy vitrimers: dynamic polymer networks that keep a conventional thermoset's strength, thermal stability and chemical resistance, but can be reprocessed, heal their own microcracks, and be recycled. Ultralight porous aerogels engineered for thermal insulation, energy storage and environmental clean-up. Metal–organic frameworks — crystalline materials with tunable pores and enormous internal surface areas. And biosensors, where the group holds patented innovations in sensing platforms for rapid, sensitive detection.

Across all of it runs one emphasis: recycling, sustainability, and next-generation materials that cut environmental cost without giving up performance.

Getting industry to pick such things up is the hard half. He does not blame the buyer; he describes the buyer's arithmetic. An established manufacturer has a supply chain, a customer base, margins that work. A new material arrives with a qualification timeline attached

"If you talk to an established manufacturer — a guy comes, says these are the opportunities — they say it will take ten years. They already have a supply chain and they have a market. Why should I? That mindset is there."

"Fortunately, that is happening slowly now. Some of the good companies are investing a lot of money in R&D. Earlier, R&D investment was only for the sake of tax saving or something like that."

His fix is the one he keeps returning to: put industry inside the campus, so the researcher sees the qualification timeline before the research direction is set — and so the incumbent meets the material before it is a threat.

But ask him whether the incumbents can simply block what is new, and he pushes back.

"It is also there. But it all depends. If I am really inspired, I am really motivated — whatever the hurdles, whatever they think, nobody can stop."

The startup problem

Which brings the conversation to the man half-hidden by sunlight at the other end of the call.

Gagan Agrawal was in IIST's second batch — his years at the institute began in 2008, one year after Kuruvilla Joseph's own. He is now the founder of Planet Material Labs, and he joins the interview from an office he describes, laughing, as completely out of space: every room blocked with equipment, ten days from moving into its own factory.

Kuruvilla Joseph brings him up, repeatedly and by name, as the exception to everything he has just described.

"People are not taking that risk. That's why you appreciate Gagan. Because he took the risk. It is challenging, and he took it as a challenge — to demonstrate the opportunity."

"People like that — a B.Tech from IIST, excellent coaching from our institute, the kind of position that is a dream for many of the youth in India. But his passion was something different. He wanted to start a new company with his own innovation. That is what is needed. That was missing in our country. Fortunately, for the last five to ten years, because of new government bodies, a lot of people are coming into that."

Then he lays out the founder's actual problem. Taking a technology from a laboratory demonstration to a pilot product — in his language, from TRL 1 to TRL 6 — takes two to three years of focused work, and at least two. During those years the founder earns nothing, while the family and society around him push in exactly one direction.

"Meanwhile, your family and society are not supporting you, because you should go for a job — this is a very, very risky business, what about your future. We are human beings. Naturally, it will be in your inner mind."

The fix, as he sees it, is financial.

"There should be fantastic, continuous financial support for those who are involved in startups. The founder should get a salary. Some sort of level of guarantee. I have discussed this with many startups. Maturing an industry is not an easy thing. Competition, financial management — a lot of things we have to support. That is very, very important."

Several countries already run versions of it. The US has SBIR and STTR grants. Germany has EXIST. Israel built the Yozma model of state capital matched to venture funds.

India has its own schemes — BIRAC, NIDHI, the Startup India Seed Fund — but the coverage is thin, and it is thinnest exactly where he works: deep-tech hardware, where the runway to a first product is measured in years, not quarters.

His second proposal is the consortium. Not every materials startup can fund its own pilot line, and in his view they should not have to.

"We cannot compare ourselves with Reliance or the Tatas or Adani. There are small players. Their investment level is very, very limited. We can have a consortium of industries in similar or related areas. Pool the resources — infrastructure and money. By that, the competition between these small industries can also be reduced."

I told him — warning him he might laugh — that what he was describing is what venture capital is supposed to do: pool risk, pool patience, pool commercial knowledge around a thesis. He did not disagree. His answer was that a founder mobilising money stays locked on a single vertical, while the transition now arriving — he calls it Industry 5.0 — will not respect verticals at all.

"We should equip our industries, especially small-scale industries and startups, to address that. For that vision we need a collective, cooperative effort, where all streams of people are coming together. Because everything current is going to be outdated in another couple of years. Not fifty years."

A materials bank

The other thing he is convinced India needs, and does not have, is a strategic reserve of critical materials.

"We are facing a materials block. We need to have a materials bank. Just like petroleum — we are storing petroleum. We should develop a strategic deposit of materials, under the control of the government. Then only will the industry grow."

He lists the gaps. Rare earths. Lithium. Silicon — India has good silicon deposits, he notes, yet most wafers still come from China. Carbon fibre is worse: dependent on one or two countries.

"We don't have all of it. We should collect and keep it as a future resource."

"Somebody may think — no, no, we are not going to supply. Then we will be in trouble."

The war currently running through global logistics has already given India a preview; even medicine supplies, he points out, have been affected. What he is prescribing is an infrastructure programme.

"When you are becoming a superpower, you should have your own deposit of all the raw materials. In a targeted way we have to spend money — in another two, three years' time, you should have enough raw materials for the next fifty years, hundred years of work."

How? India, he argues, has one under-used asset here: its diplomacy.

"India has very good diplomatic relations with many countries. We have to do collaborative research and spend money to get these materials. And we should have a huge storage of that."

The framing sounds unfashionable — strategic stockpiling reads as a 1970s planning commission idea — but the substance has resurfaced in critical minerals policy across the United States, Japan and the European Union, all of which are building state-backed reserves of the materials he lists.

India has begun similar efforts through KABIL, the joint venture for critical mineral acquisition abroad, and the National Critical Minerals Mission announced in 2025. The scale is modest relative to what he is describing.

"Without materials we cannot do anything, even if we have the concept. Everything will depend on another country."

AI and the composite

The last strand of his view concerns how the research itself is going to change.

"Earlier, I had to fix the fibre content, the matrix content, make the composite, test it, do a theoretical simulation, and finally fix it. Now, because of AI and machine learning, they can predict everything. They can predict the shape. They can predict the properties. They can even select the best materials available within these properties."

He describes designing a composite the way an architect briefs a building. His other word for it is a recipe.

"Just like an architect: I want to produce a product, and my condition is that this material should have this much strength, the modulus should be this, the toughness should be this, the elongation should be this, the thermal coefficient, the environmental stability — I am listing fifteen, twenty criteria. I have a database. The system will enable me to select the best combinations, and if I am going to have this, what would be the processing — and they can also predict what problems you are going to face, and how to solve them."

The part he values most is the last item: the problems, predicted before the first sample exists. For a man whose whole method is built on problems, an engine that forecasts them is a new kind of instrument.

Companies like Citrine Informatics, Uncountable and MaterialsZone have been building toward this for a decade. Google DeepMind's GNoME model, published in late 2023, predicted 2.2 million new inorganic crystal structures — about 380,000 of them stable enough to be candidates for synthesis, a haul DeepMind likened to nearly 800 years of materials discovery. Composite design — fibre, matrix, filler, process, each choice multiplying the next — fits the same methods.

"Speed, and precision also. A total revolution in the coming years. In the industry, everywhere, it is going to go this way."

Once the design problem is reduced to prediction, the bottleneck moves back to where he started: identifying the right problem, and building the path from lab to market. AI does not solve that part. A country that cannot commercialise its ideas only gets faster at producing ideas it cannot commercialise.

Metamaterials

Materials keep replacing one another, and aerospace shows the pattern most clearly.

"Aerospace material started with wood. Aluminium alloy is there — but for the last several years, carbon-carbon composite has been the biggest market in the aerospace industry. Even the space industry."

So the question is what displaces composites. Ask him, and he does not hesitate.

"Metamaterials. The next level is coming."

A metamaterial gets its properties from its geometric structure, not just its chemistry.

"I can simulate the properties by changing the directions and the shape."

Combine that with 4D printing — printing objects whose shape changes under heat, electric or magnetic stimulus — and a material stops being a part and starts being the machine. He gives two examples, one small and one large.

The small one is a gripper.

"I can think of a robotic arm made up of a composite and polymer. Given a magnetic or electric stimulus, it can go and pick something up. For that property, the chemistry should be strong enough."

No motor, no gears. The grip is a property of the material itself. The large one is the aircraft wing.

"Imagine the flight wings. There are flaps, and for the different controls, actuators and motors. Suppose I have a simple polymer composite sheet that can do all this by stimulus response. I can reduce the weight, and the signal."

He holds up his hand and flexes his fingers — a wing flap made of a single responsive sheet, no hinge, no motor, folding because the material has been designed to. Less weight and less signal complexity. When I finished the thought for him — and fuel consumption falling with them — he agreed.

At the end of the conversation, he and Dr. Deeraj turn openly speculative.

"I believe that one day, humans will be printed."

The thought experiment behind it: a document can now be transmitted anywhere and reproduced exactly. If 3D printing keeps descending toward atomic scale, then in principle the specification of a physical object — eventually, a living one — could be transmitted and rebuilt elsewhere. Another planet, even.

He is half-serious. He laughs as he says it. But it is also a tell, because the underlying claim is one he means completely.

"The confinement of barriers between chemistry, mathematics, economics, social science, mechanical, electronics — that is over. For any development, we need a cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary approach."

And the list is not rhetorical. He puts the soft disciplines inside the design loop, not around it.

"When you are making a product, the social impact of the product, the economic aspect of the product, is very important. We are talking about sustainability — what do you mean by sustainability? The social science is very important. The economics is very, very important. When you are designing a product, all of this should come."

The philosophy

The thing Kuruvilla Joseph keeps coming back to is ownership.

He has worked in Brazil. He has worked in Sweden. He has worked at St. Berchmans, at Nirmithi, at IIST. In each place, he says, he did the same thing.

"You don't worry about where you are. You may be in a small industry or a small institute. But try to dedicate yourself to that industry, for the growth of that industry. Consider it your own. It is your own industry. It is your own institute. I did that. I'm doing that."

He says my institute often, and means it as a working principle, with a correction he makes himself: my institute means our institute. The word is for belonging, and should not be taken the other way.

"Each one of us should have the feeling that it's my home. My institute. If you have that concept, new ideas will come. You can discuss with others and try to implement them. That is the driving force."

Partway through this, I told him he was reminding me of a book — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig's book about a single idea, quality: that how you do anything — down to tightening a chain on your own motorcycle — is part of who you are.

"Yes. That's why one should be passionate. Always, I am considering it that way. I was in many institutes — I told you, in Brazil, in Sweden, at St. Berchmans College. But here, I dedicated a hundred percent, even today. Because it's my institute."

There is no short answer to how you build that culture at scale, and he does not pretend to have one. But he has seen what it looks like when it works — at ISRO, where reviews land on deadline and chemists end up running avionics divisions. And he has seen what it looks like when it does not — in the seventy percent, in the paper-counting, in the certificate lying in his own drawer.

He is still running his group. He is still refusing to give students their problems. He is still trying to spark the next mind — his word for what exposure is supposed to do.

At the end of the call, he returns to the line that has organised his forty years.

"Future is composite. Even today, it is composite."

Safe harbor

This article reflects the interviewee’s views, which are his own and do not necessarily represent the positions of IIST, ISRO, the Department of Space, or any other institution mentioned. Some technical claims — including his estimate of India’s composites import dependency at roughly sixty percent, the research group’s count of carbon-fibre-producing countries, and the account of the indigenously developed atomic layer deposition system — are his figures and recollections, flagged as such in the text. Readers making investment, research, or policy decisions on the basis of this material should verify independently.

Methodology note

This story is based on an extensive interview with Prof. Kuruvilla Joseph, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Registrar and Dean, and Professor of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), Thiruvananthapuram. Dr. B.D.S. Deeraj, his former PhD student, and Gagan Agrawal, founder of Planet Material Labs and an IIST alumnus, were also present on the call and contributed context. Quotes have been edited for grammar and clarity from a rough machine transcription of the call; the speaker’s voice and meaning have been preserved throughout. This is NOT a paid article.