A 53-year-old Harvard Business Review article could hold clues to India’s persistent business family feuds

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A contested will, family agreement, multiple HUFs and warring siblings, the ongoing feud between Babasaheb Kalyani and his sister Sugandha Hiremath at the $3 billion Kalyani group, has all the familiar ingredients of the boiling pot that is the Indian business family.

With Hiremath laying claim to a third of all the family assets on the basis of a newly discovered Kalyani Hindu Undivided Family (HUF), the nearly 13-year-old battle within the group has just been given a fresh spark. Whatever the merits of Hiremath’s case, it is another instance of the bugbear that seems to grip almost every Indian family business, usually in the second or third generation.

The names just keep adding up. Since 2000, these include Ambani, Hinduja, Oberoi, Chhabria, Singhania, Wadia, KK Modi, among many others.

Given the family’s preponderance as owners of Indian business - and a report by the Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise of Indian School of Business places the number of such businesses at nearly 91 percent of all listed Indian entities - it is safe to say that a very large share of business in India is crippled by this menace. Indeed, even as the alarming developments in the Bharat Forge group play out, the dispute within the Kirloskar family is getting equally messy with one faction (Kirloskar Brothers Ltd.) seeking intervention by Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) for the disclosure and implementation by Kirloskar Oil Engines Ltd of a 2009 deed of family settlement signed between prominent members of the family and affiliated business entities.

Matters in India are further complicated by the attitude towards women who in most cases are excluded from the business. Thus, in 2017,