N. Srinivasan and the story behind the great revival of CG Power

Srinivasan, the long-time financial leader of the Murugappa Group and credited with founding Cholamandalam Finance, was handpicked by the group’s supporters to lead the rescue mission. He hesitated at first. “I thought I was making the mistake of my life,” he recalls in an interview with . MintHe describes how CG Power’s liabilities, lawsuits and paralysis seemed insurmountable in the early dark days of the pandemic.

The company was declared as a non-performing asset. ₹2,600 crore to secured creditors, ₹750 crore to unsecured lenders and huge sums from unpaid dues to employees and the tax department. Foreign guarantees had also gone bad, leaving him facing further claims.

He says it was discipline and method that got him through this success. Srinivasan, an early riser who starts clearing his emails at 3:30 a.m., has set up thematic WhatsApp groups he calls “symbolic war rooms” that keep track of every moving part of the business. He stayed in all of them, sometimes active, often silent, always taking in information. This rhythm of communication became the initial backbone of the revival.

His first task was financial prioritization. It raised fresh capital by leveraging credibility built over decades with lenders and matched it with long-term loans from SBI and others. “I knew the bankers well,” he says; this familiarity helped the company find funding even when its situation seemed hopeless.

He then negotiated to pay 43% of dues to secured creditors, collected vendor and employee payments in full, and restored CG Power’s working capital cycle. Within a few months, CG transitioned from an NPA to a standard asset, and after 15 months the balance sheet was completely reorganized.

But the book and Srinivasan’s narrative make it clear that finance alone does not drive returns. His leadership style, marked by humility and non-confrontation, was equally effective. Knowing that CG Power has a long history and a culture of its own, Murugappa deliberately chose not to impose his practices overnight.

“The first six months were spent gaining their trust,” he explains. At the height of the virus, he visited factories, masked, cautious but determined, and met in person with workers, unions, and vendors. He promised transparency, fast payments and a clean exit from the chaos of the past; The organization gathered.

Operationally, Srinivasan launched Project Mudra, Project Lean and Project Regain. After years of delayed payments, sellers’ renewed initial purchase practices and reduced risk-priced premiums; the latter brought in Japanese consultants to overhaul productivity, workflow and shop floor discipline; The third focused on regaining lost customers and market share. Together, these efforts boosted margins and morale, setting the company up for four years of consistent quarterly improvement.

Real estate has surprisingly become one of the toughest and most lucrative battles. A contentious dispute over land in Kanjurmarg appeared destined for protracted litigation until Srinivasan reached an unlikely settlement. ₹400 crore. He repeated the same feat at the company’s Mumbai headquarters, convincing bankers to accept the repayment so that CG could secure a much larger owned space in a future redevelopment. “You are in the banking business, not real estate,” he reminded lenders; This was a sentence that would also make its way into the book.

The book also includes brief insights from Dinesh Khara of SBI and Vellayan Subbiah of Murugappa Group. Khara explains that he discussed stressed asset possibilities with Vellayan almost three years before the acquisition, and admits that CG’s surprisingly rapid turnaround, which saw its loans paid off much earlier than expected, “may have actually worked against the bank”.

Vellayan admits that he first noticed CG Power because he owed it to Shanti Gears. ₹10 crore – but instead of pushing for a recovery, he called a banker to understand the deeper story and the acquisition process began.

The bond between Vellayan and Srinivasan, who once reported to him, is woven throughout the narrative. Despite initial misgivings over issues such as retaining the Mumbai headquarters, Vellayan backed down and gave him a free hand. In the book, he compares Eastern and Western approaches to stressed asset resolution and argues that the CG Power story shows how pride, culture and collective purpose can be as powerful as transactional negotiations.

The book also describes how Srinivasan strengthened CG’s strongest businesses while revitalizing its weakest businesses. The engines division, which contributes more than half of the company’s revenue and Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), attracted his personal attention: he met dealers, OEM customers and suppliers himself.

The railway traction engine business, which had been short on working capital for years, recorded 27% growth as liquidity returned. “The tiger was alive and back,” he says. Then came an ambitious push into semiconductors; It was an unexpected development even for him, which resulted in the government giving approval for a large OSAT facility.

Away from the balance sheet, the book reveals a lesser-known side of Srinivasan: the family man within a family of corporate heavyweights.

His siblings are N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, and N.S. Ganapathy Subramaniam, former COO of TCS (NSG). When the trio meets, the conversation inevitably turns so businesslike that he jokes: “Our wives complain that we meet for work and not as family.”

Such meetings have become rarer as Chandrasekaran’s responsibilities have increased, but today he is publishing Srinivasan’s book, in which NSG also participates in a rare family-professional rapprochement.

Srinivasan, who has now retired from the Murugappa Group, says he wants to spend the next years teaching his comeback story in business schools. Many institutions have already contacted us. “If there is an opportunity, I will definitely spend the time,” he says, befitting a man who writes, walks, thinks and works with the strict discipline of a monk, yet has engineered one of India’s most spectacular corporate revivals.

Great Resurrection After all, it’s not just a book about saving a company. This is a study in leadership under pressure, disciplined optimism, the power of confidence, and the quiet strength of a man who believed and proved that nothing succeeds like success.