Packing A Punch

Vimal Kedia’s company has grown to become a trusted supplier of packaging solutions to major FMCG players

- Sayan ChakraBorty

In the summer of 1977, when Vimal Kedia graduated from Assam’s Tinsukia College—about 500 kilometres northeast of capital Guwahati—matters had taken a turn for the worse at his family business. The flour mills that his family had been running for the past three decades in Tinsukia and Guwahati were sold earlier that year to pay off creditors, leaving the then 21-year-old Kedia to face a baptism by fire in entrepreneurship.

His maiden venture Vimal & Co, an umbrella manufacturing business that he set up in Guwahati later that year, did brisk business in the rain-soaked states of Assam, Manipur and Nagaland. But, it wasn’t until another four years that Kedia found his true north.

Things changed on a fortuitous trip to Delhi in 1981, when an acquaintance introduced Kedia to plastic manufacturing. The clanking of state-of-the-art machines in a factory, a far cry from Kedia’s modest workshop, had him hooked. “I saw machines taking out polythene tubes. Raw materials were introduced from one side and finished products emerged from the other end. To me, it was a miracle,” recalls Kedia, now 62, of his first brush with plastic manufacturing.

It took him another two years to replicate the miracle. In 1983, armed with a ₹10 lakh loan from Punjab National Bank, Kedia kickstarted Manjushree Plastics, a manufacturer of flexible packaging materials like plastic pouches and sheets in Guwahati. His first clients were the tea estates of Tata, Assam Co, Goodricke, HUL and Duncans, among others, to whom he had sold his Rhino brand of umbrellas earlier.

Three and a half decades since then, Manjushree Plastics (now Manjushree Technopack) has become a formidable force in the plastic packaging industry.