What made Niira Radia shut India's largest PR group?

On October 18, in the morning, Niira Radia called her top executives to her Taj Wellington Mews residence in Mumbai.

As they trooped into a room, the central attraction of which is a large Ganesha, most of them sensed she wanted to get out of the daily grind of business: public relations agencies Vaishnavi and Nucom, and government affairs consultancy Noesis.

She had worked round the clock for almost ten years, gone through ups and downs, and built a business of almost Rs 100 crore.

So, maybe she wanted to take life easy.

What she announced left some of them very surprised: she had decided to shut the business on November 1, the day of Vaishnavi's 10th anniversary and a day after her contract with Tata Group would have expired.

She wouldn't leave her people in the lurch, she said.

While many would be absorbed in Reliance Industries, the bread-and-butter customer of Nucom, those left without a job would get three months' salary.

"We were signing accounts as late as the first week of October when we took on board a Titan Industries subsidiary. We had readied contracts for some non-Tata companies which would start from November," says a senior Vaishnavi executive.

Radia's decision to close shop was as dramatic as her entry into the country's close-knit world of public relations.

Text: Surajeet Das Gupta, Business Standard

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