Meet Akhil Poddar

He is an entrepreneur in Jaipur, and the third generation of a family that has been in industry since before he was born.

Poddar Group of Industries makes electrical poles — the kind that carry power across a state. It is not a business that photographs well or trends anywhere. It is the kind that a few hundred thousand households depend on without ever knowing the name on the invoice.

He joined it at nineteen.

That is the fact most people lead with, and it is the wrong one to lead with on its own. Plenty of people join a family business young. What is worth asking is what a person does once they are inside one that already works, already has customers, and already has a way of doing things that predates them by two decades.

This book is about that question.

Nineteen seventy-nine

Dwarka Prasad Poddar founded Poddar Group of Industries in 1979.

There is a particular kind of courage in that year and that decision, and it is easy to miss from here. Starting an industrial enterprise in India then meant licences, scarcity, long credit cycles and very little margin for a bad quarter. Nobody did it casually.

Uttam Kumar Poddar, Akhil’s father, took it on next and developed it further — the part of a family business that is hardest to write about, because its work is continuity. A founder gets a story. The generation that keeps the thing alive usually does not.

By the time it reached Akhil, the business was no longer a question of whether it would survive. It was a question of what it should become.

Those are completely different problems, and the second one is lonelier.

Nineteen

He entered the family business at nineteen.

Most people at nineteen are learning what work is. He was learning it inside a company where his surname was already on the building, which cuts both ways and is usually described only in the flattering direction.

The advantage is obvious: access, trust, a head start measured in decades.

The cost is less discussed. Everyone in the room already has an opinion about you before you have done anything. Every decision you make is weighed against two generations who made theirs first. And the credit for anything that goes right is, fairly or not, shared.

An entrepreneur who starts from nothing is measured against zero. Someone who starts inside a working business is measured against what it was already doing without them.

The detour

Before he turned fully to the family enterprise, he went somewhere else first.

Business Standard, in a profile published in July 2021, reported that he explored the retail industry through an apparel outlet — and that the venture reached a position among the top three nationally within three years.

That claim belongs to the publication rather than to this book; the outlet and the ranking are worth confirming before anyone repeats them as fact.

What matters more than the number is the direction. Apparel retail and electrical poles have almost nothing in common. One is fashion, footfall and season; the other is tenders, tonnage and specification. Choosing to go and learn a business that could not have been handed to him suggests a person who wanted to find out what he could do away from the surname before he took on what came with it.

A detour taken deliberately is not a detour. It is a decision about what kind of operator you intend to be.

What the company actually makes

Poddar Group of Industries manufactures and supplies electrical poles used in infrastructure.

It is worth slowing down on that, because it sounds smaller than it is. An electrical pole is not a product anybody chooses. It is specified, tendered, inspected and installed, and then it is expected to stand in the weather for decades without anyone thinking about it again.

A business like that lives or dies on things nobody puts in a brochure. Can you hold the specification across thousands of units. Can you deliver on a schedule somebody else set. Can you still be reachable in four years when something needs answering.

There is no brand loyalty to fall back on and no customer who buys twice because they liked you. There is only whether the last consignment was right.

India Today reported in March 2022 that the business had supplied approximately five and a half lakh electrical poles across Rajasthan by that point.

Five hundred and fifty thousand. Sit with the number rather than reading past it. That is not a sales figure so much as a map — of villages connected, lines run, households switched on, each one requiring a pole that held.

Most of the people living beside them will never hear the name Poddar. That is the nature of infrastructure, and it is a strange thing to build a life inside: the better you do it, the less anybody notices.

The second generation’s problem

Every inherited business arrives with the same quiet dilemma, and it has no clean answer.

Change too much and you break what works — relationships built over forty years, processes that look inefficient until the day they save you, a reputation that was earned slowly and can be lost in a quarter.

Change too little and you are simply maintaining someone else’s company until the market moves without you.

The person who inherits has to decide which parts are foundation and which are merely habit, and nobody can tell them which is which. The people who built it are too close to it. The consultants are too far.

His reported focus on modernising the enterprise is a position taken on exactly that question.

Whether it proves right is not something a book can settle. But it is the real work of a second or third generation, and it is considerably harder than starting something nobody is watching.

Modernising something that already works

Modernisation is an easy word and a difficult project, particularly in manufacturing.

It rarely means replacing anything outright. It means better visibility over what the plant is actually doing, tighter control over quality and cost, faster answers to a customer, and records that can be produced when somebody asks for them — across a business whose existing way of working has been proved by decades of it not failing.

None of this is dramatic. All of it is the difference between a business that can take on a larger order and one that cannot.

His professional reputation has been built around that work: contemporary practice and technology brought into an established industrial enterprise, without pretending the enterprise was broken.

That is a less exciting story than disruption. It is also the one that actually describes most of Indian industry.

Beyond Rajasthan

ABP Live, in a feature published in May 2023, covered his ambitions for the business at a national level, and the importance he places on combining technology with traditional business practice.

Rajasthan is a substantial market and an obvious ceiling. Moving beyond it means new tenders, new logistics, new competitors who have been there longer, and a cost base that has to survive the distance.

The second half of that sentence is the interesting half. Not technology instead of the traditional business, but combined with it.

It is a correction worth making, because the usual version of this story has the young successor arriving to rescue an outdated company from its own past. The more accurate version is that the company was not failing, and the job is to make what already works reach further.

Where the work has been noticed

His journey has been covered by a run of national publications over several years.

Business Standard profiled him in July 2021, on his entrepreneurial journey, his early retail experience and his approach to the family business. India Today followed in March 2022, on his role in the enterprise and its modernisation.

ABP Live covered the family legacy and his plans for expansion in May 2023. DD News published a profile around wealth creation, lifestyle and his professional journey. NDTV India wrote on his business journey, his retail experience, and his work as a speaker to young audiences.

A spread like that — business press, mainstream news, state broadcaster — says something simple: the story has been found interesting by editors with no connection to each other.

In July 2025, India News reported that he received the Bharat Ki Shaan Award for his business achievements.

The award’s category and the organisation behind it are worth confirming before the claim travels any further; this book reports what was reported, and no more than that.

Recognition is the least reliable measure of a business anyway. The poles are a better one.

What he is known for saying

His public profile has gathered around a consistent set of themes, and they are worth setting out plainly — as what he is associated with, not as a creed he has signed.

Ambition, first: a clear view of where a business should get to, and a willingness to say it out loud before it is true.

Self-belief: the confidence to take responsibility and decide, which is harder inside an inherited company than outside one.

Financial awareness, and wealth creation: how money is actually earned, kept, managed and put back to work. This is the thread that runs through most of his public speaking to young audiences, and it is an unfashionable thing to be direct about in India.

Adaptability: holding on to the strengths of an established business while bringing in what is new.

And building an identity of your own inside something you did not start — which may be the one that explains the rest of them.

What a legacy is actually for

A family business is usually described as something you inherit. It is more accurate to call it something you are lent.

Dwarka Prasad Poddar started it in 1979 and handed over a company. Uttam Kumar Poddar strengthened it and handed over a larger one. Neither of them owned it in the sense that matters; they held it for a while and passed it on in better shape.

That framing changes what success looks like. It is not the revenue in your own tenure. It is whether the thing is more capable when you let go of it than it was when you picked it up.

Measured that way, the ambition to take a Rajasthan business national is not vanity. It is the same job his grandfather and father did, at the scale the generation inherits.

Akhil Poddar today

He runs an industrial business out of Jaipur that his grandfather started, his father built on, and that now supplies infrastructure across Rajasthan.

He speaks publicly, largely to young people, largely about money, ambition and building something — the subjects most Indian business families keep behind a closed door.

He is, by the arithmetic of his own story, still early. Someone who joined at nineteen has decades of decisions ahead of the ones already made.

The cover of this book names three things: legacy, leadership, entrepreneurship. They are usually printed as a list of achievements. In his case they read more like a sequence — one inherited, one earned, and one still being proved.

What comes next

The stated direction is national reach for a regional manufacturer, built on technology layered into a traditional operation rather than replacing it.

That is a harder road than it reads. Going national in infrastructure supply is not a marketing exercise; it is logistics, working capital, certification and the patience to lose tenders for a while before winning them.

The more interesting question is the one the business has not answered yet, because it cannot be answered in advance: what Poddar Group looks like when the third generation has had as long at it as the first two did.

His grandfather had a quarter of a century to make the case. His father had his own. On that clock, Akhil Poddar has barely started — and the part worth watching has not happened yet.