New Delhi, Nov. 29 -- At 94, Jaiprakash Gaur should have been sitting atop the hill of Indian enterprise, having built a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate from scratch.

Instead, he now watches his empire in ruins, his reputation in tatters. The man once celebrated as a builder could only stand by as the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) admitted his flagship, Jaiprakash Associates Ltd, into insolvency.

Weighed down by his group's staggering Rs.57,000 crore debt, accumulated over decades of ambition that produced expressways, dams, cement plants, and townships, Gaur faces the ultimate indignity of an entrepreneur: his life's work auctioned off.

It had not always been this way. Born in 1931 in a small village in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pra...