An exhaustive investigation into the meteoric rise and tragic collapse of a visionary entrepreneur.
The news of V. G. Siddhartha’s tragic death in July 2019 sent shockwaves across India and raised some unsettling questions: Was his death truly an accident? What immense pressures drove a successful and influential entrepreneur to such desperation?
V. G. Siddhartha was more than the visionary founder of the ubiquitous Café Coffee Day chain – he was a titan of Indian entrepreneurship. From his humble roots in a Karnataka coffee plantation, Siddhartha built an empire that transcended coffee, venturing into finance, logistics and hospitality. With a starting capital of just ₹30,000, his company grew into India’s largest coffee curing plant, culminating in the creation of the beloved Café Coffee Day chain, with an astonishing 1,700 outlets across the country at its peak. In his remarkable thirty-three-year career, Siddhartha strategically invested in a diverse portfolio of companies, including industry giants like Infosys and Mindtree, and rubbed shoulders with top industrialists, tech pioneers and powerful politicians. At the zenith of his success in 2018, Sidhartha’s net worth was estimated at over ₹3,000 crore. Beneath this gleaming façade, however, lay a convoluted and ultimately unsustainable reality – a web of over fifty companies burdened by an ever-mounting debt of over ₹5,000 crore.
The first cracks in this meticulously constructed edifice appeared after income tax raids, followed by relentless pressure from angry lenders and investors. Through scrupulous reporting and extensive research, business journalists Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta undertake an exhaustive investigation into how Siddhartha’s mega enterprise began its inexorable descent into collapse to pose essential questions about the cost of ambition and the perils of relentless growth.
Rukmini Rao is a financial journalist who has reported extensively on Karnataka-based businesses for over a decade for both print and television media. A former lawyer, her journalism career spans over thirteen years, during which time she has worked with Business Today, CNBC TV-18 , Bloomberg TV India and Times Now. She is the co-winner of the 2019 Polestar Award for Best Feature in Business Journalism. A coffee aficionado, she has been tracking Café Coffee Day for many years. Rukmini lives in Bengaluru.
Prosenjit Datta is a veteran business journalist with over three and a half decades of experience. He has previously worked with Economic Times and Business Standard and covered financial markets, big corporations, technology trends and the macro economy. He later went on to become Editor of Businessworld and Business Today, where he built award-winning teams that garnered every prize in business journalism in India and several international ones. He is currently a columnist for Business Standard, New Indian Express and moneycontrol.com. Prosenjit lives in Delhi.
