There was a time when Rajat Agrawal did not know how he would get back into business. His lead-recycling ventures had failed, his bank had forced the sale of his family home to recover dues and the factory he had built had no buyers.
Three decades later, the founder of Gravita India is running a business that generated consolidated revenue of nearly Rs 4,000 crore in FY25 and has expanded from lead recycling into aluminium, plastics and other recycling and manufacturing businesses across India and overseas.
The distance between those two points is what makes Agrawal's story less about a conventional startup success and more about how a business can be rebuilt after its original model stops working.
Rajat Agrawal, a mechanical engineering graduate from Malaviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT), had decided early that a conventional engineering career was not for him.
While still in college, he convinced his parents to give him Rs 1 lakh to buy agricultural land. He purchased 20 acres on the Diggi-Malpura Road and started cultivating vegetables, learning scientific farming methods along the way. The farm generated sales of Rs 1.35 lakh in its first year and Rs 1.85 lakh in the second.