City Pulse

The Vittal Mallya Road is named after the famous entrepreneur, Vittal Mallya, father of Vijay Mallya. 

Born on 20, December 1955 in Dhaka to Devi and Bantwal Ganapati Mallya, Vittal Mallya was a successful Bangalore-based businessman. He was the youngest of three. Vittal Mallya studied at the Doon School in Dehradun and later at the Presidency College in Kolkatta. Even though Vittal Mallya could have easily gotten a job in the corporate sector he decided to become an entrepreneur. 

Detailed Description:

He made a few attempts in starting his own business but he was eventually drawn to the liquor industry after he came across a balance sheet of a liquor company. Adept at analysing it, Vittal Mallya saw an immense potential for good returns in the industry provided one could run the business in a professional manner. He also realized that he could use the profits generated from this company to diversify into other industries and build lasting assets. Vittal’s ambition to build a huge business conglomerate with diversified interests.

In fact the assets he created during this time helped his son raise resources to his manifold business. The company that immediately caught his attention was United Breweries Ltd, founded in 1915 and was run by the British. In the earlier avatar, it used to sell bulk beer to British troops in the nineteenth century. Before long, Mallya started acquiring the shares of the company United Breweries and became a major stakeholder in the company.

Had things remained the same he would have received good dividends from the company year after year but a stroke of good fortune completely changed his life. In 1947, when India gained Independence, most Britishers who had business interests in the country, started abandoning their companies to return to their homeland. In the case of United Breweries, impressed by Mallya’s intelligence, the management handed over the reins of the company to him. So at the age of 22, Vittal Mallya became the head of a large company. So began his tryst with the liquor industry.

Four years after taking over United Breweries, Vittal Mallya made his first acquisition, McDowell and Company Ltd, a company based in Chennai. At that time, McDowell was a foreign importer of liquor, tea etc. In 1959, Vittal Mallya set up the company’s first distillery in Kerala as a part of the backward integration plan. He also struck a deal with the owners of some foreign brands to start producing their liquor locally with value addition coming in the form of foreign concentrates.

Mallya’s genius was at play again when he decided to market these Indian substitutes of foreign liquor as ‘Indian Manufactured Foreign Liquor’ (IMFL), a term continued to be used by domestic liquor manufacturers. Vittal Mallya hit pay dirt when a new government took over the reins of the country after winning the general elections in 1977 by defeating Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party.

A few snippets of his personal life: 

• In the month of December 1983 in the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai Vittal Mallya suffered a massive heart attack. The doctors who were summoned to attend to Vittal Mallya pronounced him dead. 

• There is also a famous hospital named after him in Bangalore (Vittal Mallya Hospital).

Know your City is conducted in collaboration with the students of Sri Kumaran Children's Home. The main aim of the project is to create an awareness among Bengalureans about the history of city's roads and streets. 

Pic Source: The Hindu