20 | FORBES ASIA NOVEMBER 2016

From Gurukul

to Gainful

Rapid rise of Patanjali products in India has enshrined an unlikely billionaire.

BY MEGHA BAHREE

SUMIT DAYAL FOR FORBES

E

very day some 300 trucks roll out of a 150-acre

manufacturing complex on the outskirts of

Haridwar, one of India’s holiest cities. The car-

tons of juices and herbal candy, toothpaste and

soap, flour and spices, and a variety of herb-

al medicines to cure seemingly everything, including head-

aches, arthritis, asthma and high LDL cholesterol, are des-

tined for sale in every corner of the country.

This plant, its biggest, supplies roughly 60% of the output

of India’s fastest-growing consumer goods major, Patanjali

Ayurved. Its revenue grew nearly tenfold in the four years

to the March 2016 fiscal year, to $758 million. The feverish

growth has minted one of the country’s newest billionaires,

Acharya Balkrishna, who owns 98.5% of the unlisted compa-

ny, with an estimated wealth of $2.5 billion.

Balkrishna’s oice is in a corridor of a sprawling 200-

bed ayurved (traditional Indian medicine) hospital, a short

drive from the factory. Across the street is a 10-acre nursery

he oversees where nearly a thousand varieties of plants are

grown and studied, with a new research lab meant to explore,

among other things, the impact of certain herbs on animals.

“What you see today is not what it has always been,” says

Balkrishna, 44. “Even in philosophy they say you shouldn’t

trust everything you see. Either it will be less or more.”

Balkrishna certainly started out with a lot less. His parents

are natives of Nepal, but his father was working as a guard at

an ashram in Haridwar when Balkrishna was born, one of six

brothers. They moved back to their village in Nepal soon after

(and remain basic farmers, he says), but Balkrishna returned

to India at age 12, attending various gurukuls (residential

schools of the type that were the primary precolonial means

of education in India). It was at one of those gurukuls in 1988

in Haryana that he met the person widely known today as

yoga guru Baba Ramdev, with whom he built Patanjali.

The two hit it of and kept in touch via letters, reuniting

at another school a year later. After their formal education

ended, Balkrishna moved around India to study plants and

their medicinal value, a key element of ayurveda.

In 1993 he and the slightly older Ramdev were living in

the Himalayan caves of the Hindu pilgrim town of Gangotri, a

popular haunt among holy men and ascetics near the source

of India’s holiest river, the Ganges. In his telling, because of

his knowledge of herbs Balkrishna would get frequent re-

quests from visitors for medicines for common ailments.

That planted the seed for what was originally a charitable

supplier of ayurvedic medicines and treatment.

“When we were students we never thought we wanted

to become very big businessmen or make a lot of money, that

was never our mind-set,” says Balkrishna, who has a large

portrait of Ramdev (there’s seemingly one in every room on

the company’s premises) embossed in metal behind his desk.

“We didn’t come from any major family background. Had

that been our thought, we would never have gone to a guru-

kul. Everyone knows by going to a gurukul and studying San-

skrit, no one becomes rich. We went to a gurukul thinking

we’ll become experts in our ancient texts and philosophies.”

The duo registered a charitable trust in 1995 and, they say,

carried their medicines to neglected and troubled parts of the

country. The initial medicines were folk herbal cures. They’d

also buy more complex medicines from ayurved pharmacies

to hand out. “We’d pile medicines on our heads and then go

by bus and train to distribute them,” Balkrishna says.

Ramdev started hosting small yoga camps across the

country that by 2002 had found a spot on a couple of reli-

FORBES ASIA

BALKRISHNA’S BOUNTY