Harish Damodaran is National Rural Affairs & Agriculture Editor of
The Indian Express and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. A journalist with thirty years of experience as a field reporter and editorial analyst, he is also the author of
India's New Capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation (Permanent Black/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 and Hachette India, 2018).
Broke to Breakthrough is a business biography of India's largest dairy products company - Hatsun Agro - and its founder R.G. Chandramogan.
Hailing from Virudhunagar district of Tamil Nadu, Chandramogan started this venture in 1970 as a twenty-one-year-old, making ice candies with three people in a 250 sq. ft. rented place and selling in pushcarts. By the mid-1980s, 'Arun' ice cream had become the market leader in the state. But Chandramogan didn't stop at that - he branched into the dairy business by leveraging his brand-building experience with 'Arun' and forging connections with farmers.
Thus was born Hatsun Agro Product. It is today a Rs 5,500 crore-plus company that also has pioneered a unique model of directly procuring milk from over 4 lakh farmers (B2F) and selling only branded consumer-facing products (B2C).
