Up until 1965, my father, Mr K. K. Nag, was the Managing Director of an MNC in Mumbai and my mother, Mrs Surabhi Nag, was a barrister practicing at the Bombay High Court. They decided to leave what was a secure and comfortable existence in Mumbai and embark on the rather risky and uncomfortable journey of starting an SSI unit in Pune because they were both fiercely patriotic and wanted to contribute to the industrial development of the then new nation of India.

They founded K. K. Nag Private Limited in 1965, originally as moulders of FRP, which was a new material in India at the time. They later diversified into moulding of EPS, primarily for the packaging of consumer durables and for cold chain applications for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. Over the past 3 decades, we have expanded our portfolio to include materials such as EPP (which is mainly used in the automobile industry and for reusable packaging applications; and, more recently, in cutting-edge sectors like drones and electric vehicles) and LLDPE (which we rotomould for a variety of different applications). We have also widened our geographic reach by establishing factories in Chennai and Puducherry.

We are now expanding our capabilities while prioritising manufacturing excellence. Our K. K. Nag Operational Excellence (KOpEx) programme is designed to facilitate this by adopting a cluster-based approach with each of our manufacturing units benchmarking and competing against one another each month. Our plants also strive to be more energy efficient by concentrating on lean and green manufacturing; all 5 of our eligible manufacturing plants are GreenCo certified with 3 receiving Gold ratings and 2 being Silver-rated! Our objective is to be the most technologically advanced and customer-focussed player in all the industries that we operate in. We have set ambitious goals for our 60th year with a key focus on digitisation and automation and are on track to achieving them.

As a company committed to the polymer industry, we are very conscious of the negative publicity surrounding plastics and the often ignorant messaging about them. The only scientific manner in which the environmental impact of different materials can be compared is through a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) that measures the effect that each material has on the environment from birth to death. Several LCAs have proved conclusively that plastics are much more benign to the environment than alternatives like paper on all counts other than biodegradability but polymers are often vilified for this one factor alone. That is what prompted us to launch our RecyCole initiative wherein, in partnership with local governments and NGOs, we collect back all used EPS and recycle it back into EPS! We are also researching and exploring other materials that are equally environmentally benign as EPS and are also biodegradable.

Today, India is the fastest growing major economy in the world and is poised to remain so for the foreseeable future. It is an incredible opportunity that we want to capitalise on. We expect to continue expanding our portfolio of product offerings and geographies, and are excited about our future … #KKraftingPolymerPossibilities!