Anand Mahindra

Anand Mahindra was born into an industrial family, went to Harvard to study film, and spent the next forty years turning a company that assembled American jeeps under licence into a group that designs its own vehicles, builds more tractors than anyone else and runs one of India’s largest software businesses.

Ludhiana, 1945

The story of his inheritance starts before he was born.

In 1945 two brothers, J. C. and K. C. Mahindra, set up a steel trading company in Ludhiana with a partner, Malik Ghulam Muhammad. They called it Mahindra & Mohammed. At independence and partition in 1947, Ghulam Muhammad moved to Pakistan, where he became its first finance minister. In 1948 the company was renamed Mahindra & Mahindra.

By then it had found the business that would define it: assembling Willys jeeps under licence. The jeep suited India’s roads, its army and its farms, and for decades Mahindra meant, to most Indians, a rugged utility vehicle designed somewhere else.

J. C. Mahindra was Anand’s grandfather. His uncle, Keshub Mahindra, ran the company from 1963 to 2012.

Bombay and Harvard

Anand Gopal Mahindra was born in Bombay on 1 May 1955 to Harish and Indira Mahindra. He went to the Lawrence School in Lovedale, a boarding school in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu.

He then went to Harvard College and studied film-making and architecture. He graduated with honours in 1977. It was an unusual choice for the heir to an engineering business, and he has talked about it as the thing that taught him how to tell a story, which he says is the core of leadership.

He went back to Harvard for an MBA and graduated from Harvard Business School in 1981. In 2010 he gave the university $10 million to support the humanities, and its humanities centre now carries the family name.

Starting in Steel

When he came home in 1981, he did not join Mahindra & Mahindra. He joined a group company, Mahindra Ugine Steel, as an executive assistant to the finance director.

He rose to president and deputy managing director of the steel company by 1989. In those years he pushed the group into new areas, including property development and holidays; Mahindra Holidays and its Club Mahindra brand came out of that push.

He also backed a young banker. In 1985 Uday Kotak started a finance company, and Anand Mahindra and his father were among its early investors. That is why one of India’s largest private banks is called Kotak Mahindra.

1991

In 1991 he became deputy managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra. It was the year India began opening its economy, and the timing mattered. The protection that had allowed a licensed jeep to dominate its market for forty years was about to disappear, and global carmakers were coming.

His first years at the company were spent on productivity. The plants were overstaffed and slow. He pushed through a long and difficult programme to change how they worked, and it made him unpopular with some of the workforce before it made the company more competitive.

He became managing director in 1997, and vice-chairman and managing director in 2003.

The Car Built In-House

In the mid-1990s Mahindra tried the obvious route to a modern car. It formed a joint venture with Ford to make the Ford Escort in India. The venture did not work for Mahindra, and it left within a few years.

The lesson he took from it was that Mahindra would never be more than a junior partner if it only built other companies’ designs. So it decided to design its own SUV, from scratch.

The company had no experience of doing this and no global carmaker’s budget. It worked instead with its suppliers, who designed many of the parts themselves and shared the risk. The result, the Scorpio, launched in June 2002. Its development cost was reported at around ₹550 crore, a fraction of what a global manufacturer would have spent on a new vehicle.

The company later put that capability into bricks and mortar. Mahindra Research Valley, a large engineering and design campus near Chennai, opened in 2012 and became the home of the group’s vehicle development.

The Scorpio sold well and became one of the best-known cars in India. More importantly, it proved that Mahindra could design a vehicle on its own. Every Mahindra SUV since, including the electric models launched from 2024, descends from that decision.

The group also bought the Bengaluru electric-car maker Reva in 2010, which became Mahindra Electric, and entered a team in the first season of the all-electric Formula E motor-racing championship in 2014. Its range of electric SUVs, the BE 6 and XEV 9e, followed in late 2024.

Tractors and the World

The part of the group most people outside India never see is its biggest by volume. Mahindra is the largest tractor maker in the world by the number of units sold. It bought the Indian tractor company Swaraj in 2007 and expanded into the United States, China, Japan and elsewhere.

In 2011 it bought a majority stake in the South Korean carmaker SsangYong. That deal did not end well. SsangYong kept losing money, and after it went into court receivership in late 2020, Mahindra gave up control. Mahindra also bought the Italian design house Pininfarina, jointly with Tech Mahindra, in 2015.

Rescuing Satyam

In January 2009 the founder of Satyam Computer Services, then one of India’s top software companies, confessed to years of falsified accounts. It was one of the largest corporate frauds in the country’s history. The government stepped in and put the company up for sale.

Tech Mahindra — which had started in 1986 as a joint venture with British Telecom — won the auction in April 2009. It was a large bet on a company whose real numbers nobody yet knew. The two companies merged in 2013, and Tech Mahindra became one of India’s five largest IT services firms.

Chairman

In August 2012 he succeeded Keshub Mahindra as chairman of the group. In November 2021, as Indian rules began separating the roles of chairman and chief executive at large listed companies, he became non-executive chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra, leaving day-to-day management to professional executives.

In 2011 he gave the group a single idea to rally around, which it called Rise: the claim that the group’s purpose was to help people and communities rise, and that a tractor company, a software company and a holiday company could share that purpose even if they shared nothing else. It is the kind of corporate slogan that is easy to mock, and he used it relentlessly, as the thread tying together a group that had become very diverse.

He is also one of India’s best-known businessmen on social media, with more than ten million followers on X, where he posts about engineering, inventors and ordinary people’s ideas as often as about his own companies.

Nanhi Kali

In 1996 he started Project Nanhi Kali, which pays for the schooling of girls from poor families. It has supported hundreds of thousands of girls since. The group also backs music and theatre festivals, and Mahindra was an early backer of the Pro Kabaddi League.

He is married to Anuradha Mahindra, a journalist who founded the magazines Verve and Man’s World. They have two daughters, Divya and Aalika. The Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 2020.

The measure of him is a single change of habit. For fifty years the company his grandfather started made other people’s designs. He made it design its own, and then made that the normal way of working.

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