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Keshub Mahindra, the Indian industrialist who built his family’s steel and automotive business into a sprawling multinational conglomerate but whose reputation was tarnished by his conviction for ignoring a toxic gas leak that killed thousands in Bhopal in 1984, died on April 12. He is 99 years old.
His company, Mahindra Group, confirmed his death in a statement but did not specify where he died.
Under Mr. Mahindra’s leadership, the company expanded rapidly from its core business of trading steel and building Willys jeeps into a conglomerate with businesses in more than 20 industries, including cloud and network technology, hospitality, renewable energy, logistics, financial and real services. estate.
He forged international partnerships with companies like Peugeot, British Telecom and Mitsubishi, helping the company build its business in India while taking Mahindra global. He neglected Mahindra’s core business as he grew, and in that time the company has become India’s leading automaker, known for its SUVs, and a global supplier of tractors.
Today, the Mahindra Group employs more than 260,000 people in more than 100 countries and has annual revenues of $19 billion. Mr. Mahindra’s personal fortune is worth $1.2 billion, according to Forbes.
Mr. Mahindra said there are two main keys to building a successful multifaceted international business: avoid arbitrarily forcing the new management on the business that has been bought, and know when to walk away from a bad deal.
“When we acquired some of these businesses, we made sure that the senior management of the group stayed with us,” Mr. Mahindra told an interviewer at Harvard Business School in 2013. “We made some changes.”
And, he added, “We’re not afraid to go out of business if we don’t meet global standards.”
He also serves on the corporate boards of major Indian companies, such as Tata Steel and ICICI Bank. His role as chairman of one such board, Union Carbide India Ltd., involved him in the Bhopal disaster.
On the morning of December 3, 1984, 40 tons of deadly methyl isocyanate gas released from a Union Carbide pesticide plant dangerously close to a densely populated neighborhood in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh State in central India.
More than 3,000 people are thought to have died that night, many in their sleep, and many more — estimates range from 10,000 to more than 15,000 — died from the long-term effects of chemical exposure. Hundreds of thousands were sick or injured.
Activists and the Indian government blamed lax management at the plant for the accident. There were many reports of accidents and dangerous conditions at the factory before the disaster.
The company blamed sabotage and insisted that local officials were responsible for managing the plant.
Mr. Mahindra, VP Gokhale, who was a director of Union Carbide India, and Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson, an American citizen who flew to India after the disaster, were arrested on December 7. the most serious of which is criminal conspiracy and possible murder.
Mr. Anderson was released within hours on bail on the condition that he leave the country immediately. Mr Mahindra and Mr Gokhale were released on bail the following week.
The Indian government filed a lawsuit against Union Carbide in 1986, and three years later India’s Supreme Court ordered the company to pay $470 million in damages, with each victim receiving an average of $550. As part of the settlement, the government dropped criminal charges against Mr. Anderson, who died in 2014 without trial in India.
The prosecution of Mr. Mahindra and seven other former executives, all Indians, dragged on for more than a quarter of a century, stymied by an inefficient court system. In 2010, all eight were sentenced to death for negligence. (By that time, one defendant had died.) They were fined about $2,100 and sentenced to two years in prison, but were released on bond.
Satinath Sarangi, an advocate for the victims of the disaster, described the verdict as “the world’s worst industrial disaster turned into a traffic accident.”
In a 2013 interview with Harvard Business School, Mr. Mahindra said that as chairman he was not the person in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the company and insisted that he had been made a scapegoat.
“How can we choose a non-executive chairman who has no interest in the company’s capital, who has no authority to manage the company?” he asked.
But, he said, “Even now I still think about it, because it was a terrible tragedy. It should never have happened.”
Keshub Mahindra was born on October 9, 1923, in Shimla, then the summer capital of British-ruled India and now the capital of Himachal Pradesh State, in the north of the country.
His father, Kailash Chandra Mahindra, founded the steel trading company first known as Mahindra & Mohammed along with his brothers, Jagdish Chandra Mahindra, and Ghulam Mohammed in 1945.
Mr. Mohammed left the company and became Pakistan’s finance minister after India’s partition in 1947, and the Mahindra brothers renamed the company Mahindra & Mahindra.
Keshub Mahindra, who recently graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, joined the company that year. He became chairman in 1963, after his father’s death and soon after the company expanded into tractors through a deal with International Harvester. The company now claims to be the world’s largest tractor manufacturer by volume.
He stepped down in 2012, and his nephew Anand became chairman. Other survivors include his wife, Sudha Mahindra; three daughters, Uma Malhotra, Leena Labroo and Yuthica Mahindra; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Mahindra is a major philanthropist, focusing much of his charitable work on education, especially for women. The KC Mahindra Education Trust, founded by her father, has helped educate more than 500,000 underprivileged girls in 14 Indian states and has awarded more than $119 million in grants and scholarships, according to its latest annual report.
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