The textile to tech journey of a Chettiar industrialist

What were the factors that led up to the birth of the IT industry in Bengaluru in the 1980s? This question on the IT Revolution in India has parallels to the birth of the Scientific Revolution in Britain in the 1680s, in which coffee houses played a surprisingly powerful role. They were democratic spaces, facilitated discussions and arguments, and were hubs of intellectual exchange; “cultural infrastructure” if you will.

The birth of the IT industry in Bengaluru likewise has its own version of the Grecian Coffee House — Sona Towers, which is more than mere cultural infrastructure. It is real infrastructure that served uninterrupted electricity and satellite links. The kind of coffee that computers drink.

The Sona Story: The Textile to Tech Journey of Chettiar Industrialist C Valliappa by Chitra Narayanan is part a business memoir and part biography of the man who built Sona Towers and the larger Sona Group into a diversified conglomerate.

We now see office complexes and campuses in all major cities, millions of sqft in size, with offices that employ thousands of white-collar employees. It all began at Sona Towers, the first ever instance of white-collar infrastructure at scale. It’s a fascinating story and the book tells it well: the freeze on construction in Bengaluru in the early ’80s after a seven-storey building collapsed, Rajiv Gandhi’s push to bring in foreign investments in tech, and the setting up of a remote R&D facility by Texas Instruments (TI) in Bangalore.

It’s clear that Valliappa just willed success to happen, solving one problem after another to ensure TI got all they wanted; a roof strong enough to hold a satellite earth station, uninterrupted access to heavy-duty electricity, a wind map etc. It was the first commercial real-estate project for him too. Meanwhile VSNL and C-Dot set up their office also in Sona Towers. Cisco, Oracle, Verifone and a host of other IT and Telecom multinationals soon followed, and Sona Towers became the first Software Technology Park in India. The revolution was underway.

The larger theme of Valliappa’s journey is his intrepid forays into new areas, perseverance while battling problems, figuring out solutions along the way, and finally creating something that was both scaled-up and sustainably so. This innovation streak seems to be uniquely his, and not so much from the lineage of the two generations before him. Both IT / Tech and real estate, that too outside Tamil Nadu (TN), are not areas that Chettiars have really gotten into. (The community tends to focus on TN, and apart from legacy/ traditional industries, their signature impact is in the education business). And he has led the group into a range of new areas in health and wellness, biotech, design and engineering services etc. These range from designing fire engines for US municipalities to stepper motors for the ISRO Chandrayan programme.

At the same time he is firmly rooted in the traditional Chettiar ethos as well: The group has a major presence in education in Salem, the family are big contributors to renovation and upkeep of temples, and Valliappa is a deeply devout man with high conformity to tradition. He is positively old-fashioned when it comes to single-minded focus on paying back the money he borrows from banks.

There are stories dotted throughout the book that give a glimpse of the man: he not only learns Kannada enthusiastically but also changes his name from Valliappan to Valliappa to be more in sync with Karnataka, or the anecdote of how he refuses to lease space to a non-vegetarian restaurant. He is also details-oriented without being a micro manager, and has exceptional memory.

Two additional aspects also stand out; the emphasis on innovation and R&D in all his businesses, notably in education where he is also keen that the students get into this invention mindset early. And the emphasis on architecture and design, whether modular furniture or building design on the campus at Salem.

It is good that the family has taken the initiative on this business biography. This book makes for an important addition to the larger stories of business and entrepreneurial success and the contributing factors, and is required reading for family businesses. The evidence from round the world is that just about five per cent of family businesses survive to the fourth generation. The first two generations build and grow the business. The third generation is the one that sees affluence and privilege and usually lacks the hunger and propulsion. There is lots to learn from the way Valliappa and the Sona Group has broken and rocketed past this curse of third generation.

Valliappa is active in a variety of industry associations, and well known in tech, real estate and higher education space in in Bengaluru. But otherwise, he maintains a strikingly low profile in a city now synonymous with tech.