The Passing of a Titan

An Unfinished Agenda: My Life in the Pharmaceutical Industry, by K.Anji Reddy, Portfolio, Penguin India, 2015, pp 270, Rs 699.

Larger than life panegyric canvases are normally painted of captains of industry. It is rare to come across a modest account of a self-made man told modestly by himself, especially if he is an Indian magnate. But the late Dr. Anji Reddy, the founder of the pharma giant, Dr. Reddy Labs, was no ordinary Indian. Not only did he create one of India’s most successful concerns, but he never lost sight of the main purpose of his entry into the pharmaceutical business, which was to provide affordable medicines to humanity.

At the end of a long meteoric rise to fame and fortune, he himself fell victim to the monarch of maladies, liver cancer. With superhuman determination he held on to life, at least a year beyond the most optimistic expectation of his doctors, to dictate his story from his sickbed, to Raghu Cidambi, a trusted friend and former colleague.

Anji Reddy was born the son of a turmeric farmer in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. A good teacher developed a love of science which soon led him to join the University Department of Chemical Technology in Bombay, which to all accounts was an excellent teaching institution. From there he went on to join IDPL in Hyderabad as a junior scientist. The event that changed him from an ordinary government servant to a bold entrepreneur was Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon in 1969. Fired by that daring exploit, he launched his career. Years later his company’s annual report would carry a statement about his vision:

Twenty one years ago when I entered the pharmaceutical industry as a technocrat-entrepreneur, I nursed a dream. I observed that the drugs launched in the developed West were prohibitively expensive.... So I wrote out the mission of my life: to bring new molecules into the country at a price the common man could afford.

Forming a small company, Uniloids, he was successful in making metronidazole to world standards from basic raw materials in India. Several leading companies bought this active pharmaceutical ingredient from him for their own well-known formulations like Flagyl or Metrogyl, to combat endemic diseases like amoebiasis. The next step up the ladder was the Indian manufacture of sulphamethoxazole at an unbeatable price. Reddy relates a lovely story how he demanded entry into the office of his best customer, Burroughs Wellcome, when he was still an unknown man! Real success was to come when he launched Dr. Reddy Labs and made norfloxacin, a powerful antibiotic first developed by Japanese scientists. Tablets using it sold at Rs 80 for a strip of ten in India, which he thought was too expensive for the common man. He went against advice and marketed the drug at Rs 38 per strip. Though competitors tried to sow doubts about his products, doctors accepted it wholeheartedly, and he was famous.

Anecdotes brighten the pages. Every meeting with a famous chemist or industrialist remained fresh in his memory and he recorded them in detail from his sickbed. Dr Karanth, Yusuf Hamid of Cipla, Lord ‘Almighty’ Todd, Sir James Black, Sir Walter Bodmer, all are remembered with affectionate respect as men who helped or influenced him.  With almost childlike fascination, he remembered the posh cars they sent to fetch him, the high-life of the West, and the razzmatazz connected with raising funding. This is how he recorded the moment when Dr Reddy’s was listed on the New York Stock Exchange:

            A minute before opening time, Grasso led us on to the floor of the exchange. And suddenly it hit us – the open outcry, the sense of frenzy. This was the pulse of capitalism.

Reddy was never an ordinary businessman. He set up a joint venture in South Africa with the J&J Group, set up by Jay and Jayendra Naidoo. Jay had been a trade unionist, and a close colleague of Nelson Mandela. Reddy remembered him with simple affection: No man who walked the long road out of prison with Mandela could be anything but extraordinary. Reddy joined him in the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. Reddy touchingly hoped in his last hours that his subsidiary in South Africa would ‘serve the needs of the South African people as its first chairman, Jay Naidoo, would have wished.’

Another revealing moment in the book describes the time in Russia when the rouble fell dramatically against the dollar in 1998, and Reddy’s staff advised him to pull out of there before his unit lost more value. He decided to remain in Russia not only because it was a huge country with great resources and able to recover in time, but India had depended on Russia for many decades. Russia had provided technology and training to IDPL from before he had joined it.  He adds: No other developed nation had done so much for India.

The story of his acquisition of betapharm, Germany’s fourth largest generic drugs company, is interlaced with affectionate memories of meeting Anita Bose Pfaff, Netaji’s daughter, in Ausburg. Indeed part of the charm of the book lies in such anecdotes, recalled to a mind that remained sharp till the end, despite the pain of disease in his body. The book is filled with accurate facts about prices, technologies, meetings, moods, and in between inconsequential human stories that make the book so enjoyable for the ordinary reader. Few historians of science, let alone businessmen, might know the details of the origin of the Merck group back in 1668 as well as Anji Reddy did, or the astonishing fact that the grandmother of its present chairman translated Tagore’s play Chitra into German and published it even before he was awarded the Nobel Prize! Above all, Reddy honoured George W. Merck’s philosophy that medicines were for people and not for profits, and mailed that message to all his employees in 2006.

Anji Reddy was not satisfied with making affordable bulk drugs. He wished to invent new medicines, and came within an ace of doing so with his anti-diabetes balaglitazone, but unfortunately the vagaries of business thwarted him that time. With his personal money he formed a research company Kareus Therapeutics in 2009 with a few scientific like-minded enthusiasts. The large final chapter deals with his social commitment to society, his support of the Naandi Foundation, and his support for mid-day meals for schools, coffee growing by tribals in the Araku valley, training of youth for livelihoods and many similar activities.

One has to look back long in time to find another titan of his calibre, who rising from modest circumstances created an industrial giant, but never forgot that success needs to give back to the ordinary people from whom he was sprung. If America can point to Andrew Carnegie, India can to Anji Reddy.