Jai Hari Dalmia, the Indian cement tycoon who dominated the industry by generating $1.6 billion revenue for Dalmia Bharat Group with his younger sibling Yadu Hari Dalmia passed away on July 8. It is reported that he died at the age of 82 due to post-Covid-19 complications.
Who was Jai Hari Dalmia?
Dalmia was a non-executive director at Dalmia Bharat who made the company India’s fourth-largest cement company by capacity. For this, the brothers got featured on the World Billionaires List with a combined fortune of $2.2 billion earlier this year. Their wealth is drawn from the company’s majority of stake that has recorded a 190% hike in 2020.
Jai Hari Dalmia had a B.E. degree in electrical engineering from Jadavpur University and a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne.
Jai Hari joined his family cement business in 1970 that his father Jaidayal Dalmia had set up in 1939.
In the mid-1980s, he separated from his broader family and took over Dalmia Cement along with his sixth of seven brothers, Yadu Hari Dalmia. At that time, the business unit in South India was small. It had only two refractory units and an iron ore mine in Karnataka.
The two brothers worked their hearts and soul for nearly four decades, taking the business to heights through the era of strict government controls on fuel, power, wages, and products. India’s economic liberalisation ended in 1991. Despite the controls over sales and distributions and the availability of funds for any project to only public sector institutions, they made it big. Dalmia Bharat today has 13 factories in nine states that operate through a network chain of roughly 32,000 dealers and sub-dealers around the country.
