Praj Industries joins the global race to produce ethanol in an environment-friendly way. The way things are, it seems unlikely Praj will succeed
If somebody argued ethanol is as sexy a business as building spacecraft or sequencing the human genome, you wouldn’t be faulted for suppressing a chuckle. After all, what is there to ethanol? Even the folks from the Neolithic era knew that this intoxicating ingredient in alcoholic beverages could induce a pretty good buzz. But if you indulge the irrepressible Pramod Chaudhary for a moment, he’ll argue passionately why you’ve got it all wrong. He will tell you how he and his company, Praj Industries, hope to make it the fuel of the future.
As things turn out, the founder of Praj is ostensibly in the middle of a mad race to change the world we live in. And he hopes to be the first to reach the finish line. At stake is a market estimated at 189 billion litres by 2020 according to a US government study. Chaudhary wants to take a good shot at being remembered by history textbooks as one of the men who weaned the world away from fossil fuels like petrol and diesel. Of course, it is another matter altogether that Praj wasn’t originally built to change the world.
A few years ago, some smart entrepreneurs, Chaudhary included, had figured out how to isolate ethanol from food crops like sugarcane, wheat, soya and palm oil. With a large addressable market, businesses were quick to latch on to the men who ran these businesses and exploited every edible commodity they could to extract ethanol out of it.
(This story appears in the 31 July, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)