Nanji Kalidas Mehta

Nanji Kalidas Mehta, MBE, Rajratna, (17 November 1887 – 25 August 1969) was an industrialist and philanthropist from Gujarat. He founded the Mehta Group of Industries in British East Africa, now having its head office in India.

Mehta was born on 17 November 1887 in Gorana village, near Porbandar in the Princely State of Porbandar, British India. He was born in a Gujarati Hindu family of Lohana caste. He left for East Africa at the age of thirteen in 1900.

He married Santoshben Mehta. Shekhar Mehta, the sports car driver, and Jai Mehta, the businessman, are his grandsons.

He started his career as a trader and ventured into growing vegetable, cotton and then sugarcane in swamps of Africa. He then turned in sugar manufacturing and tea and coffee plantations in East Africa. He in his later life also started Cement plant, ginneries, textile unit and oil mills in India. He thus founded the Mehta Group on conglomerate, which is now spread across the globe.

He was contemporary of some other Gujarati businessman and philanthropist of East Africa like Meghji Pethraj Shah, Muljibhai Madhvani and others. On the original building of Muljibhai Maghvani's office in Jinja, Nanjibhai's name still appears as DUKA YA KALIDASI, a mark of their friendship.

He established the present day Sugar Corporation of Uganda Limited under the name Uganda Sugar Factory in 1924 at Lugazi. He was one of the first exporters of Uganda's cotton to Japan and other places which greatly helped in the establishment of the cotton industry in Uganda.

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