From being the soldier son of a small-time farmer, to manning toll booths, and now being the chairman and MD of the TBR Group that he founded, T. Bhogeswara Rao has come a very long way. Mr Rao served as an airman with the Indian Air Force till 1993, when he took voluntary retirement. He was drawing a modest salary of Rs 3,300 at the time. Today, he is heading business ventures spread across many states with an annual turnover of more than Rs 10 crore.
When serving with the IAF, Mr Rao went on with his studies and obtained an LLB. After his discharge from the IAF, he enrolled as an advocate in the State Bar Council of AP and practised law till 2003. “The National Highway Authority of India was looking for ex-servicemen to man the Vijayawada-Visakhapatnam section of the NH-5 in the state. I was closely associated with ex-servicemen’s welfare and was fighting their causes, so we managed to get the project. After that, there was no looking back. We started with a modest strength of 55 ex-servicemen,” recalled Mr Rao, half of whose employees are ex-servicemen or their children.
The TBR Group, which manages toll operations and highway maintenance activities, now operates in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and the Union Territory of Pondicherry (Puducherry). In Rajasthan, the company doubled the toll revenue to Rs 68 lakh per day by the time the project there came to an end. “All this happened by rooting out corruption,” Mr Rao asserted, claiming that so far, TBR has earned a revenue of more than Rs 1,500 crore for the government. Mr Rao is trying to sow the same seeds of inspiration in the students of TBR Sainik School and Junior College in his native village Alampuram, West Godavari.