New Delhi, Jan. 3 -- In the mid-1960s, a young Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-trained chemical engineer returned home to India, which seemed determined to smother his ambition.

In the 1960s, the country was a fortress of the Licence Raj, a bureaucratic labyrinth where every tonne of steel produced or spindle turned required a nod from a somnolent clerk in New Delhi. While his peers were busy petitioning the government for the right to grow, Aditya Vikram Birla did something far more subversive. He decided that if the state would not permit expansion within its borders, he would have to redefine where those borders lay.

Born on 14 November 1943, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he attended St. Xavier's College, Aditya Birla ...