Man With A Mission

Dr Rajendra Joshi is credited with developing several therapeutic drugs, including the well-known Fumaderm and Tecfidera (BG 12). The research scientist, who has spent most of his life in Switzerland, has now turned his attention to developing India’s vast talent pool through various skill development initiatives.

- Joseph Rozario

GIVEN THEIR BUSINESS ACUMEN and reputation for building and running successful ventures, Marwaris are synonymous with enterprise in India. Dr Rajendra Joshi is no exception, but his entrepreneurial trysts have stemmed more from his desire to empower youth, rather than a desire to be entrepreneurially successful or rich. Dr Rajendra Joshi’s passion has been education and medicinal research, for which he has spent most of his life in Switzerland. Having developed well-known drugs like Fumaderm and Tecfidera (BG 12), he now is back in India to empower the youth through skill development initiatives, which include setting up a university in Jaipur called the Bhartiya Skill Development University that focuses on vocational training and diverse businesses that constitute the Rajendra and Ursula Joshi Group (RUJ Group).

A keen learner

Dr Rajendra Joshi was born in Dundlod, in 1934, to a family of seven brothers and a sister. His father, Vaidya Mahaveer Prasad Joshi, was a scholar of Sanskrit and Ayurveda, which inspired Rajendra Joshi to take keen interest in Ayurveda and pharmaceutics and imbibe knowledge on these subjects, a voracious reader that he was. Having later studied pharmacy at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani—he passed out with a gold medal in 1958—he joined the R&D department of a pharmaceutical company in Bombay (now Mumbai) called John Wyeth. Credited with having developed a tablet at Wyeth, the company offered him a chance to go to the USA, but Dr Joshi had other plans. "I was keen to pursue research, so I took extra interest in subjects like chemistry and medicine and this earned me a scholarship to complete my doctorate (PhD) from Komensky University Bratislava [now in Slovakia] in 1968,” he says.

A scientist and inventor