Gaja Capital Business Book Prize 2022 shortlist announced

Gaja Capital recently announced the shortlist for its 2022 Gaja Capital Business Book Prize. The Jury selected a list of the top five books that cover a diverse range of topics related to business leadership and entrepreneurship. Established in 2019, the Gaja Capital Business Book Prize aims to encourage Indian writers, entrepreneurs, and journalists to tell their lesser-known stories to the world. Here we share the five books shortlisted for Gaja Capital Business Book Prize 2022:

From being a cotton trader to dreaming big of setting up his own company, this is the story behind the rise of the popular Ambuja Cement company. Interestingly, the story is told by its founder Narotam Sekhsaria in his own words. The book also won the 2022 Tata Literature Live! Business Book Award.

Photo: HarperBusiness

'Broke to Breakthrough' is a business biography about one of India's largest dairy products companies, namely- Hatsun Agro - and R.G. Chandramogan, its founder. Chandramogan hails from Virudhunagar in Tamil Nadu, where he started his venture of making ice candies, along with three people in a small rented place, at the age of 21. When 'Arun' ice cream became a market leader in Tamil Nadu, Chandramogan decided to branch into the dairy business. And thus, Hatsun Agro Product was born which today is an over INR 5,500 crore company.

Photo: Penguin Viking

"The TTK Group was founded in 1928 in Chennai (then Madras) by T.T. Krishnamachari, who later became a Union minister and held the portfolios of finance, industry and commerce for close to fifteen years. In this book, the current chairman T.T. Jagannathan, along with Sandhya Mendonca, takes us through the journey of this extraordinary company which fought off bankruptcy and rose like a phoenix to become a highly profitable, successful entity," reads the book's blurb.

Photo: Penguin Portfolio

Breaking away from his family business of Bombay Oils Industries Ltd, Harsh Mariwala established the Marico company in 1987. Today, it is one of the leading international FMCG giants with products including Parachute, Nihar Naturals, Saffola, among others. The company had an annual turnover of INR 8000 crore recently. This book tells the story of Harsh Mariwala and how he founded Marico. The book is co-authored by Ram Charan.

Photo: Penguin Portfolio

In the 1970s, 21-year-old Harish Mehta left his lucrative job in America and returned to India. The country didn't have an IT industry back then, and there were rules of the License Raj. "As young Harish Mehta struggled to find his stride, he realized that India's nascent and fragmented IT industry acutely needed a unified voice that could speak to the government, change laws and harness the country's potential. In an unlikely alliance of headstrong and competing young professionals, he united other IT entrepreneurs to envision a world-beating association that would revolutionize Indian IT: NASSCOM. 'The Maverick Effect' is the extraordinary story of this band of dreamers who joined hands to transform a nation while also changing the lens through which the world looked at India," reads the book's blurb.

Photo: HarperBusiness

Previous winners of the Gaja Capital Business Book Prize were: Amrit Raj for 'Indian Icon: A Cult Called Royal Enfield' in 2021, Mihir Dalal for 'Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story' in 2020, and Girish Kuber and Vikrant Pande for 'The Tatas: How a Family Built a Business and a Nation' in 2019.

Photo: Canva