A journey into the Indian village

Vinod Kapur was working at a Swedish company based in India that specialised in the making and selling of matches when he decided to leave it all behind and dedicate his life to rearing chickens.

He had considered this for a while, for he had a brother and he thought that chicken farming might be a way of helping him into some kind of trade. But one day in 1963 Kapur was told he had a shadow on his lung, and with a second child on the way he wondered if it might be the case that chickens were for him too.

He heard about new chicken varieties imported from Canada that could survive and withstand tough Indian conditions. He could start small, grow incrementally. When I met him in India in 2017, he was sporting a comfortable cardigan and a tidy mop of white hair. He was 82 by then, seated behind a large desk. He leaned forward as he reminisced on this and said to me: “This, young man, is how destiny works.”

The plan at first was to import chickens for rearing in India. However, the government of the day didn’t much like the idea of creating an Indian industry that was dependent on foreign imports. So Kapur and his associates had a second idea. From an American supplier he obtained a quantity of germplasm, pure breeding stock that could give rise to new generations of healthy birds.

This made the idea self-sufficient enough for the bureaucrats. Over a few years, supported by loans from his family, from these seeds he would build India’s first genetic poultry breeding business.

It did well. In the early 1970s, he moved his head office to some land just off a major highway in the growing city of Gurgaon, to the south west of India’s capital, New Delhi.