Chirayu Amin (left), Alembic Pharma’s chairman, with son Pranav, who looks after the company’s international business

The skyline of Vadodara, Gujarat’s third largest city and the seat of the erstwhile princely state of Baroda, is transforming, slowly but surely. Spacious independent houses, neatly arranged in rows, have begun coexisting with clusters of residential towers springing up in different parts of the city, which is home to several affluent Gujarati entrepreneurs.

The Alembic Group, a business house promoted by the Amin family, is contributing to this evolution of the city’s landscape in no small measure. After all, the conglomerate —led by patriarch Chirayu Amin (cricket lovers will also know him as the interim chairman of the Indian Premier League in 2010, following the unceremonious exit of Lalit Modi as well as a former BCCI vice president)—owns over 100 acres of land in the city and is gradually developing portions of it into premium residential projects.

Though the group’s real estate venture has nothing to do with its flagship listed pharmaceuticals business, the towering vertical structures are metaphoric of the equally vertical growth exhibited by Alembic Pharmaceuticals Ltd —one of India’s fastest growing generic drug makers (see box).

Amin, 69, and his forefathers laid the foundation of the 109-year old Alembic’s modern-day pharma business by manufacturing and selling everything from tinctures and alcohol to vitamins, penicillin and then active pharma ingredients (API) over the years. And now the next generation— his sons Pranav, 41, and Shaunak, 38— are helping the company achieve its unrealised potential by transforming a commodity API business that “was going nowhere,” according to Pranav, into a domestic and international generic formulations play.