Fortune India Magazine - May 2019

In this issue

THE BIG POINT OF CONCERN these days when discussing the Indian economy is about the lack of adequate private sector investment to kick-start growth. While the government has been taking steps to push infrastructure investment, not enough is coming from the private sector. However, if there is one area where the private sector has been drawing up aggressive investment plans—running into thousands of crores—it is the steel industry. Leading the charge on this is India’s largest steel maker, JSW Steel, owned by billionaire Sajjan Jindal who is busy giving the finishing touches to a mega strategy which will see his company’s capacity grow to 45 MTPA by 2030. In our cover story this month, deputy editor Ashish Gupta delves into the JSW story and examines how the company is putting together its plan of increasing capacity and maintaining leadership at a time when competition is about to get much more intense. Elsewhere in this issue, deputy editor T. Surendar brings you the story of how, a year after the Nirav Modi scandal brought the state-run Punjab National Bank, one of the country’s largest, to its knees, the management, led by managing director Sunil Mehta, is bringing the bank back to the path to profits and, more importantly, respectability. While it’s still a work in progress, Mehta’s efforts have seen the bank undertaking a massive clean-up and clocking a `247 crore profit in the third quarter of FY19. Such is the aggressive nature of the restructuring being put in place at the bank that it is now expected to report a profit of `2,266 crore by March 2020. If that happens, it would be a turnaround as big in scale as the scandal that wracked it.