Bhadran is a large village in the Charotar belt of the Anand district of Gujarat, a region with an unusual history: its diaspora built schools, libraries and hospitals at home long before the Indian state got round to it, and Bhadran itself has a nineteenth-century educational tradition of its own. Pankaj Ramanbhai Patel was born there on 16 March 1953, into a family that was about to move from village Gujarat into the pharmaceutical business, and he ended up running one of the largest drug companies in India.

A Factory Seen From Childhood

His father, Ramanbhai Patel, co-founded Cadila Laboratories in Ahmedabad in 1952, the year before Pankaj was born. That meant he grew up around a manufacturing operation rather than reading about one. He has described watching the factory floor and its workers from the age of about eight, an early and unromantic education in how things are actually made.

He was schooled at Sheth C. N. Vidyalaya in Ahmedabad and then took a master's degree in pharmacy at L. M. College of Pharmacy, one of the oldest pharmacy institutions in the country. He later added a law degree from the University of Mumbai, an unusual combination that turned out to matter a great deal in an industry where patents, regulatory filings and licensing agreements determine who makes money.

He joined the family business in 1976, in his early twenties. He spent close to two decades inside it before the event that defined his career.

1995 and the Building of Zydus

In 1995 the two founding families of Cadila formally separated their interests. Pankaj Patel took charge of the entity that became Zydus Cadila, later renamed Zydus Lifesciences in 2022. What he inherited was a mid-sized domestic formulations business. What he built over the following three decades was a vertically integrated pharmaceutical group operating across generics, branded formulations, active pharmaceutical ingredients, biologics, vaccines, consumer wellness and animal health, with manufacturing and research facilities in India and abroad and a substantial presence in the United States generics market.

Two strategic choices stand out. The first was a series of acquisitions, in India and internationally, that bought scale and market access rather than waiting to grow organically. The second, and more distinctive in an Indian generics industry that has historically been cautious about it, was sustained investment in original research. Zydus developed Saroglitazar, a novel molecule for diabetic dyslipidemia, which was among the first new chemical entities discovered and taken to market entirely by an Indian company.

The most publicly visible product of that research culture arrived during the pandemic. In August 2021 Indian regulators granted emergency use authorisation to ZyCoV-D, a Zydus vaccine against COVID-19. It was the world's first DNA-based vaccine approved for human use, it was administered needle-free, and it was cleared for adolescents as well as adults. Whatever its eventual deployment numbers, it was a scientific first achieved from Ahmedabad.

Beyond the Company

Patel has spent a considerable part of his time on institutions rather than on his own balance sheet. He served as President of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry for 2016 and 2017, the national industry body. He has chaired the boards of governors of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur, and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata. He has also served as a part-time non-official director on the central board of the Reserve Bank of India.

That list is worth pausing on. It represents an unusual amount of unpaid institutional work in higher education by a serving industrialist, and it reflects a stated conviction that India's research capacity, not its labour cost, is the thing that needs building.

His philanthropy is deliberately low-profile. He has consistently declined to publicise the size of his donations and has argued that giving time, ideas and access matters as much as giving money, a position he has taken through the Zydus foundation's health and education work in Gujarat.

Recognition and Standing

By October 2024 he was ranked twenty-fourth on the Forbes list of India's richest people, with a family fortune estimated in the region of ten billion dollars. Zydus is by most measures the fifth-largest pharmaceutical company in India.

In January 2025 the Government of India conferred the Padma Bhushan on him in the category of trade and industry, the third-highest civilian honour. It recognised a career spent turning a single Ahmedabad laboratory, founded three years before he was born, into a global research-driven company, and doing it without ever moving the headquarters out of Gujarat.

He remains chairman of Zydus Lifesciences, with the next generation of the family in operating roles, and continues to live and work in Ahmedabad, some fifty kilometres from Bhadran.

His career is also a data point about a particular Gujarati pattern. The Charotar villages of Anand and Kheda produced, within two or three generations, an extraordinary number of the industrialists, cooperative organisers and institution-builders who shaped independent India's economy, from the dairy cooperatives at Anand to the pharmaceutical and chemical firms of Ahmedabad. Bhadran belongs squarely to that belt. Patel's own trajectory, from a village in that district to the boardrooms of national institutions, is unusual in its scale but not in its shape.