When he was just 14 years old, Sanjay Mehndiratta went to work at a cloth mill in Delhi because he wanted to shoulder the responsibility to help his father support the family. Two weeks later, he found another job – at a dry fruit shop in the capital’s wholesale dry fruit market, Khari Baoli, then moved on to a toy shops “While I was working there, my sister’s marriage was fixed in 1985,” says Mehndiratta, now 50. “I requested the shop owner for a loan of Rs10,000 but he refused to give it. I left the job on the very next day.” Caught by surprise, the man went to the teenager’s home and offered him an advance of Rs20,000 if he would go back to work. It was then that he decided that he would never do another job in his life, though his father tried to persuade him to go back to the shop for another year. “My father said he didn’t have any money to support my business, as he had spent all his savings on the wedding,” he recalls. “I borrowed Rs500 from a friend. I knew about the toy trade and didn’t think much about it – but my first aim was to earn at least as much as my salary of Rs2,200, so I decided to set up my own toy shop.” In the next two years, he managed to save some money and bought a shop, then got a bank loan of Rs25,000 to start a manufacturing unit at Bhiwadi in Rajasthan, ideally located near Delhi. “I also found the working atmosphere and infrastructure there to be very good, and it was within my means to buy,” he explains. Today, having set up three more plants – in Aurangabad, Chennai and Hyderabad – Mehndiratta, founder-chairman of what he has named Toy Zone Impex, claims that it is the largest in the Indian MSME sector. The manufacturing units have the latest plant and machinery, coupled with in-house R&D and tool-room facilities in Bhiwadi. Toys of various kinds Though he is chary of disclosing the turnover of the Toy Zone group of partnership and private limited companies, he says it makes 1.5 million toys of various kinds, offering the most competitive prices and the desired quality to buyers around the globe. These prices, listed in his brochure, average about Rs1,500-3,000, putting total sales at around Rs300 crore.
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Mehndiratta manufactures 1.5 million toys a year at his four factories
