Principles
Values &
Beliefs
Not a list of words. Six positions that can be traced to something Savji Dholakia has said or done, and to the consequences that followed.
A value is only interesting where it has cost something. The six below are set out with the evidence that makes them more than assertion — a decision taken, a sum given away, a rule imposed on his own family.
Six guiding principles
Precision about small things
Nearly fifty years on, he still quotes the exact composition of his first month’s wage: ₹179 earned, ₹140 spent, ₹39 saved. The number itself is trivial. The habit of knowing it is not — and it is the same habit that later produced a company able to survive on thin manufacturing margins for three decades.
People before product
His most quoted line puts the hierarchy plainly: “We don’t make diamonds; we make people. The diamond is the by-product.” It is a striking claim from a manufacturer, and it is supported by the balance sheet — a recognition programme running annually since 2011 is not a slogan but a recurring cost.
Reciprocity as a working assumption
“Jitna dete hain, utna zyada milta hai” — the more we give, the more we receive. Read cynically, it is a justification for generosity that pays. Read as management, it is a bet that the returns from loyalty exceed the cost of buying it, sustained long enough that the bet can be examined.
Hardship is a curriculum
The month his son spent in Kochi under an assumed name, sleeping where he could and taking whatever work he was offered, was not a publicity exercise; it was a rule imposed on his own family before responsibility was handed over. “I wanted my son to learn the value of money, and to deal with challenging situations in life.”
Obligation to the place you came from
The Foundation’s water work is not distributed across India for maximum visibility. It is concentrated on a single river in the district he was born in — the district whose failing water supply pushed his generation into the cities. Restoring it is the most literal repayment available to him.
Patience, including with nature
“Grit will test your patience, and so will Mother Nature.” A hundred reservoirs and three million trees are not the product of a decisive year. They are the product of doing an unglamorous thing repeatedly, for two decades, without a completion date.
Where they came from
Inheritance, not invention
None of these positions is presented by Dholakia as original. They belong to a specific place and community — a Leva Patel farming family in Saurashtra, a region where agricultural risk was pooled across households and where obligation to the village was not optional. What is unusual is the scale at which he has been able to act on them, and the fact that he has kept acting on them after the scale changed.
The test of a value held by a wealthy person is whether it still constrains behaviour once the constraint is no longer necessary. Sending an heir to be rejected by sixty employers, or committing to maintain a hundred reservoirs for people who do not work for you, are both decisions that could easily not have been taken.
“I clearly remember the happiness those paltry savings had given me: it is nothing less than how I feel today.” Savji Dholakia