Kundapur Vaman Kamath, the former boss of ICICI Bank and the New Development Bank, has a simple explanation for why many of the erstwhile large business groups, led by well-known industrialists of the time, fell. The one big reason, the ace banker says, was that raising large amounts of debt to grow the businesses was seen to be the right thing to do at the time. Kamath, and many other bankers like him, have seen a number of these business groups set out a scorching growth pace backed by humongous amounts of debt, only to find themselves either at the wrong end of business cycles, or faced with withering demand. As these groups chased growth ambitions — often in unrelated areas — and borrowed to feed these plans, servicing these…
