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

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When N. Srinivasan walked into CG Power on 26 November 2020, he knew he had accepted the most daunting assignment of his career.

What he did not know was that it would become the subject of his first book—The Great Revival: CG Power’s Comeback from Bankruptcy to a $10 Billion Company—released today with a foreword by Uday Kotak. The book chronicles one of India’s most dramatic corporate resurrections, told by a man who entered the story reluctantly, worked tirelessly, and emerged transformed. Srinivasan, a long-time Murugappa Group finance leader credited with building Cholamandalam Finance, was handpicked by the group’s promoters to lead the rescue mission.

He hesitated at first. “I thought I had made the mistake of my life," he recalls in an interview with Mint, describing how CG Power’s liabilities, litigation, and paralysis seemed insurmountable during the dark early days of the pandemic. The company had been declared a non-performing asset, owing ₹2,600 crore to secured creditors, ₹750 crore to unsecured lenders, and large sums in unpaid dues to employees and the tax department.

Its overseas guarantees had also gone bad, exposing it to further claims. What pulled him through, he says, was discipline and method. An early riser who begins clearing email at 3:30 am, Srinivasan instituted what he calls “symbolic war rooms"—thematic WhatsApp groups that tracked every moving part of the business.

He stayed in all of them, sometimes active, often silent, always absorbing information. This communication cadence became the early backbone of the revival. His first task was financial triage.