IT OWNS satellite TV stations, a bank, an airline, 33,000 acres of real estate and employs 700,000 people. Its directors are film stars, sporting heroes and politicians. Sahara India Pariwar is the most famous company you have never heard of.
Its founder is Subrata Roy, the son of a mill worker in the impoverished state of Bihar in northeast India. With just 2,000 rupees (about £30) he set up a savings scheme in 1978 for poor farmworkers, visiting his customers door-to-door on a Lambretta scooter.
Today, Sahara’s Para Banking empire extends to 32 million customers, many of them making weekly deposits to the bank’s army of workers who visit doorsteps across the subcontinent.
It is the financial backbone of a business empire said to be worth £7 billion but it is the marketing hoopla and showbiz that will be the key to selling Sahara to expat Indians.
And it is all good publicity for the Sahara developments, satellite towns, shopping malls and gated luxury leisure complexes catering to India’s burgeoning middle class. The modest rural savers who entrust their rupees to Sahara’s doorstep bankers are funding Amby Valley, a lavish complex of swimming pools, hotels and villas an hour and a half from Bombay, and the Sunderbans project, a floating city near Calcutta with water sports and a tiger conservation scheme.
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There is an airline, Air Sahara, two satellite TV channels and a weekly newspaper, Sahara Time. Last year the company announced plans to expand into life insurance and the ambitions are wider still, to capture the Indian diaspora in Europe and America and, ultimately, the whole world, in the welcoming embrace of the Sahara family.
Sahara means “support” and Pariwar “family” in Hindi and the company is the vision of a man who thinks he is the father of all his employees.
“I believe I am the guardian of this family who has the right to love and scold all members,” Mr Roy told The Times of India recently.
Sahara boasts that employees are not union members, and staff at its headquarters in Lucknow greet each other by placing their right hand across their chest, saying “Sahara pranam” — greetings Sahara.
For such a vast enterprise there is a dearth of financial information and Sahara is closed to prying eyes. It is private, a family affair with “no owner”, the profits reinvested or distributed to good causes, we are told.
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The Sahara website is laced with the homilies and the homespun wisdom of the founder: “Our employees are not employees. They are family members. All belong to Sahara and Sahara belongs to all.”
Can it be true? Sahara’s detractors dismiss the enterprise as “a cult” or whisper that there are other investors, politicians with whom Mr Roy has excellent connections. Whatever the truth, Mr Roy is certainly well connected. Sahara’s council of directors includes Bollywood stars, Aishwarya Ray, the former Miss World, and Sourav Ganguly, the captain of the Indian cricket team.
But alongside the glitterati are men with different talents. There are two members of parliament, one former central bank deputy governor, a former Minister of Justice, a former chief justice, a former chief election commissioner and the former chief of police for the state where Sahara has its headquarters. Of the 25 members of the council, barring Mr Roy, there are only two directors with significant business experience, a former managing director of Tata Steel and a former chairman of New India Assurance.
One cannot help wondering just what they discuss at their board meetings.