Bhavarlal Jain

The story

Bhavarlal Jain was born in 1937 in a village in rural Maharashtra, into a family of farmers and petty traders. He studied commerce and law in Bombay and prepared for the civil service. His mother, who never went to school, urged him to do work that would help farmers, cattle and birds.

In 1963 he started with ₹7,000, the savings of three generations, selling kerosene from a pushcart in Jalgaon. For about fifteen years he worked as a dealer, selling tractors, PVC pipes, sprinklers, seeds and other farm goods.

In 1985 he saw a drip irrigation system at a farm show in Fresno, California, and decided to make them in India for small farmers. After failing to get the technology from Israel, he licensed it from an Australian company. Jain Irrigation became the world's second-largest micro-irrigation company. When he died in February 2016, Forbes reported revenue of over $1 billion, 30 factories and sales to 116 countries.