WASTE TO WEALTH
After studying mechanical engineering from the Regional Engineering College, Jaipur, it wasn’t a job Rajat Agrawal took up, but agriculture. He persuaded his father, a government doctor, to give him Rs 1 lakh to buy 35 bighas outside Jaipur to grow vegetables. The use of high-quality seeds and modern techniques after consulting Pusa Institute in Delhi saw him reap profits from the word go. Next, he bought 10 Holstein cows to start a dairy farm.
Fate, though, had other plans. Larsen & Toubro were looking for a stockist, and he managed to land the job. With the entrepreneurial bug biting him again, Agrawal entered lead recycling and exited dairy to set up Gravita India. However, following the 1996 Basel Convention, the government banned lead imports, forcing Agrawal to close his unit. He switched to recycling liquid lead, whose import was allowed, but the government cut duties so heavily that imports became cheap enough to cost Agrawal dear. He was forced to sell their house in Tilak Nagar.
With wife Anchal by his side, he moved to Singapore in 1999 and worked with a scrap trading company. An opportunity to start a lead recycling plant in Sri Lanka got him going again. In 2004, he sold his equity in the venture, used the profit to repay debt and invested first in Ethiopia and then in other countries in Africa, east Europe, central and north America, and in Jaipur, J&K, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh back home. In 2010, Gravita’s issue was oversubscribed 43 times. Today, it’s among the world’s top lead recycling plants, producing 125,000 tonnes of the metal.