User:Lalitjalan

Mr. Lalit Jalan (BT/EE/79) has had a distinguished academic background finishing in the top 2% of his class throughout. After completing his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering in 1979 he did his Masters in Computer Science and MBA in Finance from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylavania.

He is currently heading eBusiness for the Reliance Group (13 billion $) which is the largest Indian private sector company. He is responsible for the end-to-end e-transformation of all Reliance businesses and functions.

On completion of his education he joined General Electric Company as a Strategic Planner. After working with them for 2 years and getting his green card he returned back to his homeland India to startup a business.

He started a distribution / real estate development company and over the next 11 years grew it to a 250 crores business. This was achieved with only a small seed capital and funded through internal accruals.

At that stage Mr. Anil D. Ambani, Promoter of the Reliance Group who had studied with him at Wharton,  coaxed him into heading the Polypropylene business which was the biggest Reliance initiative at that time.

In just 42 months, Lalit grew the Polypropylene startup business to a US $1 billion (Rs 6,000 crores) turnover from scratch. This has been the fastest rampup of capacity in the world and made Reliance the 5th largest world producer. He is the Youngest Business Head ever at Reliance, contributing to 25% of Reliance's turnover. He was appointed to this position despite the lack of petrochemical experience. This has to be a record of some sort not just by Indian standards but global standards. It is really difficult to think of any profitable business growing at this rate. If this story was allowed to be aired by Reliance, this is the type of story that makes the cover of Forbes.

His major responsibilities included setting up of entire domestic and international distribution network; customer acquistion / customer acceptance of the products; staffing of the entire team; financial systems and controls; successful introduction and acceptance of more than 25 different grades, many of them for the first time in India. Despite such a demanding job, he has continued to run a consumer distribution business (personal family business) in parallel. The Polypropylene business alone created jobs for thousands of engineers in India across a wide variety of relevant disciplines - Electrical, Mechanical, Chemical, Industrial and for business majors such as Finance and accounting, to Sales and Marketing. The distribution business in Calcutta also continues to impact employment in Sales, Logistics and finance. While many distinguished alumni have certainly done well in the US and have created billion $ market cap companies, the concentration of wealth from a billion $ market cap tends to remain in the hands of a few people. What Lalit has created in a billion $ Revenue business spreads wealth across a wider set of people and impact is felt over a longer range of time.

Mr Lalit Jalan is nominated for the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding managerial skills.