Ashish Saraf, Joint Managing Director of Facor India, is refreshingly candid and convinced that his ultimate responsibility is to his conscience.

Text: Rachna Shetty & Reshma Jain

At 45, Ashish Saraf has seen enough of life to know how the world ticks. He is part of a very successful family business, is active on the social circuit, and is a member of the diplomatic corps. Just as you begin to wonder whether this interview too will go through the same old platitudes, he surprises you. It is obvious right away that familiar tags cannot describe the man.


Saraf who comes from a traditional joint Marwari family from Nagpur, but his father moved to a remote township in Shreeramnagar. Soon after graduating from an engineering college, near Vishakhapatnam, he joined the family business in the flagship company, FACOR in 1987 at the age of 22. Though liberalisation was not yet the mantra then, it was on the horizon and Saraf shrewdly guessed its closeness. He knew there were vast areas the family business could tap and grow into when the barriers came down. “It was a joint family business, and joint families are run by certain diktats and rules. A young person might not always be able to do what he/she wants to do. We had plenty of aspirations, but they weren’t necessarily achievable,” he recalls.