special feature

Access, Uninterrupted

By Shreyasi Singh

"I had agreed to do it, but didn't know how I was going to deliver," recalls Ashok Khemlani, founder and managing director of Clean India Group, about the contract that changed his life. It was 1993 and his year-old company, Cradle Runways, had been pre-qualified for providing facade access system—essentially, equipment like suspended platforms, cradles, gondolas and davits—for Bengaluru's first IT Park, a joint project by the Tatas, and the governments of Karnataka and Singapore.

"The order value was 1.25 crore, the largest budget on such a system till then. The previous year, we had done only about 10-15 lakh," he says, still surprised that his then fledgling company had even landed the big-ticket deal. But that was fate. An evaluator from Tata had taken a bet on Khemlani's incurable can-do spirit, and his company was the only Indian entity to pre-qualify. The letter of intent gave him six months to deliver, tagging along a critical condition for bagging the contract—furnish a 25 lakh bank guarantee.

Till then a one-man team, Khemlani quickly hired a senior engineer, and "burnt faxes" between Mumbai, and Cradle Runways International, his UK-based collaborators to finalise designs. That settled, he moved on to tackle the most difficult task yet—securing a bank guarantee. He landed up at the Turner Road branch of Union Bank of India, where he had recently opened an account, and wouldn't budge till he was given a meeting with the regional manager. "I got five minutes with him. I told him I'd make 30 lakh from this contract but couldn't give the bank more than 50,000 as guarantee. They wanted a quarter of the total value, and I retorted saying, I needed the guarantees tomorrow," he remembers.

"I was so confident that this project would work that I told them they could take everything I owned if it didn't. The manager suddenly picks up the phone, calls his office, and says, 'give this man the guarantee'," chuckles Khemlani, knowing how unusual a story this is in a country where winning credit from the bank can be a daunting task for small businesses.

His audacious jumpstart has brought home dizzying ascent. Today, Clean India Group, headquartered in Mumbai, is one of India's largest facade access manufacturing, solutions and maintenance firm, with a turnover exceeding 60 crore in 2010.

Its three companies—Cradle Runways, Techno Clean and TSP Access Rental—provide a complete range of engineering equipment and solutions like trolleys, cradles and jibs, and with 16 offices across India, it is also a leading player in facade cleaning in India. "We are the Spiderman rope cleaners of India," laughs Khemlani, as he borrows the nickname many use for them. Clean India has 1,100-plus employees on its rolls, and has serviced more than 900 buildings till date.

In fact, there are very few iconic buildings in Delhi and Mumbai that Clean India hasn't worked on. In October 2010, they commissioned a two-and-half kilometre single-track cleaning system at the swanky Terminal 3 in Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport. At 18 crore, this was their biggest contract ever, and the two unique tracks installed are the longest in India. They have also supplied various systems to the new Hyderabad and Bengaluru airports, and a clutch of definitive high rises in Mumbai like the 250-metre high Lodha Bellisimo, the Oberoi Westin and the Orchid Woods. At the Hyderabad Airport, they delivered a first-of-its kind travelling ladder system for cleaning the ATC Tower there. Khemlani proudly claims they have grabbed an 80 per cent market share in facade access.

It's a fact builders grudgingly accept. Rachna Amin, senior associate at Hafeez Contractor's office in Mumbai explains, "As the industry grows, more players should be available. We'd like that. But, where are the options? In Mumbai, certainly, one can't look beyond Clean India." That's no small feat for a company born out of a conversation with a friend.

Reaching up, slowly
An engineer from College of Engineering, Pune, Khemlani had settled into the middle management level, working with companies like OTIS and Bharat Bijlee through the seventies and eighties. As the decade approached its end, Khemlani felt his growth getting slower. He also dreamt of making enough money to send both his children to study abroad. This would certainly not come off a job, he knew. "A company can take care of your medical insurance, your work life balance, your pension but they can't look after your growth. For that, I had to do something of my own."

The emotion lingered and finally he chucked his job at Bharat Bijlee in 1988. What followed were four years that seem straight out of some movie script. Khemlani split his savings into two, giving his wife 30,000, and spending the rest to buy a computer. A trading business that required little capital cost seemed the right way to begin.

Equipped with his savvy salesman skills, he set to work. Avoiding popular centres like Dubai and Russia, he cleverly attacked the poorly-serviced East European markets. "Nobody wanted to go there. They were scared of the biting cold and the language problem. But, business calls for all kinds of sacrifices." Khemlani soon had transformed these hostilities into a roaring trading business—selling bulk quantities of pens, jackets, leather goods, generic drugs and "whatever else they wanted". Soon, he was spending up to half a year in Yugoslavia. "I minted money," he confesses, adding he saved up to 20 lakh in those three years.

But, his cost arbitrage game started losing its fizz as the Chinese began giving sourcing agents the option of smaller quantities. By the end of 1991, his volumes were crashing. Around the same time, an architect friend from Khemlani's days at OTIS went to Europe to learn how to build curtain walls, the term used for glass cladding on buildings.

He told Khemlani about a UK firm which designed, manufactured and installed access machines to maintain these glass facades, and also led him to his first client, a building in Andheri, Mumbai.

Khemlani moved swiftly. "That building became my first client. I was sitting in Budapest, buying from the UK and selling here, over many faxes." He sold his first access system, a manual platform, for 8 lakh, netting one lakh as profit.

It was enough to make Khemlani aware of the vast potential of the yet unborn industry. He realised demand for such glassy exterior walls would only flare up with the Indian economy opening up.

And yet, moving fast wasn't much of a luxury in an industry which did not even exist. Khemlani worked his architect contacts from his OTIS days, introducing products to them and educating them about solutions available. He inked a distributor deal with Cradle Runways, a UK-based company, agreeing to part manufacture installation components here. For over a year till the Bengaluru IT project came about, his pickings were poor. "Each building is an expression of an architect's creativity. An engineering product customised to each building is a tough job."

By the mid 1990s, the skies were becoming easier to reach. In 1994, Cradle Runways entered Delhi to service an intricate slanting glass facade at Capital Court, a building in south Delhi. Khemlani claims they are the first to enter every major Indian city.

Capital Court not only got him a foothold in the capital, it also took him towards his next expansion—manual facade cleaning. In 1998, Suhag, his 20-year-old daughter, flew to the UK to sign a pact with the OCS Group. Registering the joint venture entity was tough in India. "The government asked why we needed a joint venture for cleaning. Anybody can do it, they'd tell us," Khemlani tells us.

His insights proved right. Within two years, the new entity, Techno Clean, had grown to 800 cleaners. Cut to the present, it operates from 16 locations in India, benefitting from a local network that, Khemlani maintains, the big firms—like Cox from Australia, and Tractel from Luxembourg—who are entering India will find impossible to establish.

Amin agrees, "We used Tractel for a big project, and Cox for the IL&FS building in Bandra, but the after-sales was so pathetic we had to rope Clean India in for follow up."

A clearer view
Backed by strong growth in the last two years—owing to the spur in demand for high-rise residential projects in Mumbai—Clean India is now reaching higher. "We have done several 50-storey buildings. But, Mumbai will keep going taller, and we should be capable of delivering made-in-India solutions," says Khemlani, who has handed over the day-to-day running of the company to his children, Tarun and Suhag. Every time, they add 50 metres to their capabilities, it's truly a new high, he adds.

To retain their competitive edge, Clean India has changed their operations strategy, moving to manufacture upwards of 60 per cent of their systems, especially the intricate engineering solutions, at their factory in Khopoli. They also export components to 15 countries, and are now targeting turnkey contracts in Sri Lanka and Kenya.

Khemlani is also bullish about his new venture, an access rental company for the construction industry. Their agreement with Rapids, a Dubai-based company, will enable them to bring in 100 floor-based, reach-height machines. "Just this business is worth 100 crore in three years," says Khemlani. "Upgrading and adding to his repertoire of solutions is critical for staying ahead," explains Amin. "The demand is there and so is the opportunity to grow."

Ask him if he has a thousand-crore dream, and he answers, "This is a niche market which doesn't support that appetite." He is also content to grow the company on internal accruals, preferring to keep the private equity and market listing talk, to when they rake in a turnover of 150 crore—a goal set to be achieved in the next three years. "Bottom lines don't excite me. I am happy if I can start something new which grows by inches and gets to a height."

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