Whatever the odds: The incredible story behind DLF’ is a first-hand account of the journey traversed by a village lad, from the rural belts of UP all the way to the elite billionaire club.
In his autobiography, real estate baron and DLF Chairman, Dr K.P. Singh reveals all-the return from near-bankruptcy to creation of India’s most valuable real estate company.
Dr Singh tells the readers just how close he came to selling his shares in the DLF in late 1974 for Rs.25 lakh! The book published by HarperCollins India was released in the capital last evening, in a glittering ceremony.
“It was January 1975. I picked up my pen to sign a share transfer form. I was about to sell all my shares in DLF. On the desk before me was a cheque in my favour for Rs.26 lakh, or 2.6 million, being the approximate book value of the shares. It was the amount I would get for severing my links with DLF forever,” he wrote in the book. At present, the market value of his and his family’s holding in DLF is around Rs.30,000 crore. At its peak, in the middle of the last decade, the market value of the holdings was around Rs.1,25,000 crore.
In the book, Singh wrote that he was selling the stake at the instruction of his father-in-law and the original promoter of the company Chaudhary Raghvendra Singh, who had sent DLF’s Chief Financial Advisor Y S Tayal with share transfer form to Singh at his Willard office in Cannaught Place. “Had I signed it, my DLF story would have ended there and then. My life would have been entirely different and, perhaps, this memoir would never have been written,” writes Singh.
“But at that moment, there were no misgivings in my mind. The decision to sell my shares had been taken for me by my father-in-law. One does not even think of questioning the family patriarch, one simply does what one is told to do. That was the culture in our families,” writes Singh about his dilemma.
As he got ready to sign, Tayal warned him that once his signature on that paper is there, he will lose DLF forever. He also cautioned that since DLF had not undertaken any worthwhile real estate projects in almost a decade, its financial health was extremely poor.
“I was caught in a dilemma. But before I could react, Tayal continued, “I will be retiring from DLF in a few weeks, so I can speak my mind freely. I feel it is my moral duty to apprise you of the implications involved. Once all of you sign all the share transfer forms and accept the cheques, it would mean that your family will get permanently disassociated with DLF forever. Please think about it,” Singh wrote. “It was a wake-up call for me. In a flash, I realized the truth of what he was saying and the implications of giving away my DLF shareholding.” And he decided to continue with DLF and the rest is history.
Between the covers, the 322-pages document the challenges and — as the title suggests — the odds faced by the Dr Singh in his career: acquiring thousands of acres of contiguous land from farmers with small holdings, grappling with archaic laws, dealing with all levels of bureaucracy and policy makers with outmoded mindsets. And his battles on the personal front.
“I have cheated death on five occasions…,” says Dr Singh in the opening chapter.
Starting from Delhi, where it developed the city’s major residential colonies, the company then shifted its focus to Gurgaon in the 1970s. DLF transformed the suburbs into a mega-city of high rises that now serves as a business destination for corporate India.
The book is priced at Rs.699.
