It's fashionable, in the post-liberalisation era, to rubbish Nehru's brand of socialism and blame India's first Prime Minister for all the woes that plague Indian industry-inefficiency, disguised, and sometimes even undisguised, unemployment, lack of productivity, uncompetitiveness, disdain for quality. Rather than touting the free-market buzzword, Nehru's priorities were clearly social development: to provide Indians with the basic facilities they lacked, without any foreign help, even as he sought to build India into a democracy to reckon with.

Videocon's Venugopal Dhoot: the licence raj didn't stop him

Manu Chhabria: acquired whatever came his way

As far as nation-building goes, Nehru didn't do a bad job. But the biggest mistake successive governments made was in failing to recognise that the first pm's socialist baggage couldn't be carried forever. Result? Even as other Asian tigers surged ahead in that period, India's economy got stuck in a time warp.

One of the most regressive legacies of the socialistic regime was the licence raj and the ''command and control'' economy of the seventies and eighties, which in essence killed entrepreneurship and seriously maimed the consumer. ''If the industry wanted to go left, the government went right,'' says Pankaj Munjal, Executive Director, Majestic Auto. Projects took years, sometimes even a decade, to get cleared.

As Anil Ambani, Managing Director, Reliance Industries, points out, the decisions on the industry one wanted to enter, the equipment and technology one needed, plant location, and its capacity were all taken either in Udyog Bhavan, Shastri Bhavan, and North Block. As a result, after returning from Wharton in 1982, Ambani realised that more than half of his time was being spent in flying to New Delhi (which incidentally was one reason for Indian Airlines doing well those days; the other reason of course was the lack of competition).

Reliance's Dhirubhai Ambani: darling of the stockmarket

The poor consumer, meantime, waited and waited-for his phone connection, for his Bajaj Chetak and for his Ambassador, or Premier Padmini car. Industry was faced with two choices: Either adapt to the system, or take your business some place else. The latter is exactly what Aditya Vikram Birla did by setting up textile mills and palm oil factories in Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Nirma's Karsanbhai Patel: the first David

Back home, the licence raj nurtured a new breed of businessmen-who understood the system, picked out the loopholes and duly exploited them. That's the time when the likes of Manu Chhabria, R.P. Goenka, Dhirubhai Ambani, Karsanbhai Patel, and Venugopal Dhoot began building their empires, either by grabbing whichever licences that came up on offer or by grabbing whichever business that was up for sale. The first tentative signs of reform came in 1984, when the steel and pharma sectors were opened up, prompting families like the Jindals, the Guptas of Lloyds, the Mittals of the Ispat group, the Mehtas of Torrent and the Singhs of Ranbaxy to throw their hat into the ring.

The opportunism that the eighties called for are best illustrated in the rise of the Reliance group. Its founder, Dhirubhai Ambani, didn't go to a business school; in fact, he didn't go beyond matriculation and started working in 1953 at a Shell refinery in Aden, taking home all of Rs 300 a month. By 1977, when Reliance went public, he had become Dalal Street's darling. Over the eighties and the nineties, the Ambanis evolved into an integrated textiles giant, with huge capacities in every product line on the value chain. The Ambanis love to stress that much of their growth came in the post-liberalisation period, but the foundation was laid in the licence raj regime.

-Swati Prasad

Reform's Children: Family Businesses That Thrived In The 1990s And Early 2000s

Dr Reddy's Anji Reddy: making research pay

Sterlite's Anil Agarwal: large non-ferrous ambitions

Wipro's Azim Premji: from edible oil to software

Apollo's Prathap Reddy': healthcare pioneer

If ever there was a good time to step on the gas for Indian business, it was doubtless post-1991, when the first draughts of economic liberalisation breezed across the country's industrial landscape. After decades of fettered activity, in which pernickety governments decided which business companies should venture into, industry finally got its chance to grow the way it wanted to once the licence raj was formally throttled by Manmohan Singh & Co.

There was little choice: The country's foreign currency assets were down to less than a billion dollars, and the economy was stagnating. Scrapping of the licence raj was only one part of the reforms package. The others were opening up the economy to foreign participants, and to imports.

The latter bit might have not been the best of news for many family-run groups, but the scrapping of the industrial licensing system was incentive enough to push the growth button-by moving away from their forefathers' traditional enterprise into sunrise areas, by aggressively putting up mega capacities in core sector industries, and by hitting the acquisition trail. Indeed, post-1991, a host of new names got added to the corporate glossary. Some of these companies may have taken shape pre-1991 but much of the growth impetus came only in the past decade. The brothers Agarwal, Anil and Navin, set a blistering pace in the copper and aluminum industry with greenfield capacities and acquisitions. Dr Prathap Reddy along with his daughter Preetha Reddy transformed the Apollo group into India's largest healthcare services provider in the private sector. The Adani brothers (Gautam, Rajesh and Vasant), after creating India's largest trading house, have earmarked all of Rs 20,000 crore for forays into power, gas distribution, refining and an industrial park.

Subhash Chandra, after flagging off a pioneering business in laminated tubes in the eighties, burst into the limelight by beaming India's first satellite channel into Indian homes. The pharma giants took global strides in this period, too. In Hyderabad Dr Anji Reddy, after setting up his company in the eighties, started Dr Reddy's Research Foundation, realising that the discovery and development of new chemical entities was vital for long-term survival. The three-way split in the Bhai Mohan Singh family in 1993 was bitter, but probably the best thing to have happened for Ranbaxy, allowing it to focus sharply on pharmaceuticals. Ajay Piramal took a different route by embarking on string of acquisitions in a bid to build a pharma powerhouse.

Indeed, the nineties provided many business families that were in danger of losing their way a new lease of life. The Rais of the Usha group-actually founded way back in 1946 -sniffed opportunity in steel, telecom and information technology, Azim Premji re-invented his father's cooking oil business into a software services giant and B. Ramalinga Raju moved away from the family business of cotton spinning and construction by propelling Satyam Computers on to the global stage in 1992 by being the first to invest in a high-capacity satellite link. We can't leave out Kumar Mangalam Birla's exploits, who after taking over in traumatic and rather dramatic circumstances in his late twenties, is today fuelling growth at the AV Birla group via selective acquisitions and forays in the services sector.

Along with the enthusiasm and aggression that liberalisation brought came plenty of pain. For many business families, their mega-ambitions weren't in sync with their funding abilities. As a result, many-a mega-project spun viciously out of control: the Ruias, the Jindals, and the Mittals took some hard knocks in their bid to put up integrated steel plants, the Rais are realising that the it party can't go on and on-Information Technology, the company that propelled the Rais into the Forbes list of the 300 richest people in the world, is floundering today, with profits dipping by 49 per cent last year and by 99.5 per cent in this year's first quarter.

-Brian Carvalho