Malavika Hegde, wife of the late V.G. Siddhartha, who passed away about a year ago, on Friday penned a letter addressing the Coffee Day Group’s over 25,000 employees. In the letter, she expressed her resolve to help the group out of the morass the company is currently in.
She said she was trying to maintain the legacy of her late husband Siddhartha who with his visionary thinking had helped build up a group with interests in multiple sectors, including information technology, having helped build Mindtree. He had also built the Global Village Tech Park, Way2Wealth, Global Edge, Edge and The Serai, a resort in Chikkamagaluru, she said.
“Knowing him for the last 32 years, I can tell you that his company was his world and the employees were his family,” she wrote. She added that while the challenges were far from over, for an Indian coffee company that started the coffee revolution in India in 1996, it continues to remain a force to reckon with. She expressed how he set up Yuva, a fully-funded residential course that has trained thousands of youth from Chikkamagaluru. The large-scale employment and opportunities for growth he gave was the way for him to express his gratitude to the community.
Coffee Day today has a reach of 1,000 cities and towns in India, she said, but for him, the 12,000 acre coffee estate, Asia’s second largest may not have been around. She said her company was committed to honour all its financial commitments.
