Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani Group, addressed the 5th Annual Conference of the Society for Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery, held at the Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai.
Below is the full text of his address at the event.
Distinguished doctors, and my dear friends,
It is an honour to stand before you, addressing some of the finest medical minds in India.
Let me begin by saluting you for the work you do. Your humanity is what restores your patients’ dignity. It gives them the strength and the courage to stand tall again.
To the world, you may be known as spine doctors. But to your patients, you are something far greater. You represent hope. And speaking of hope, let me share something personal.
One of my all-time favourite films is Munnabhai MBBS. Not just for the laughter, but for the message. Munnabhai was not just healing people with medicine; he was healing them with humanity.
It reminded us all that true healing goes far beyond surgery. Healing is hope. Healing is humanity.
When I was first invited to speak here, I hesitated. What could I, as a builder of enterprises, possibly offer to you, the healers of spines? But as I sat with that question, a deeper metaphor came to my mind. The spine you mend is the ultimate architecture needed for resilience of the human body.
And just as you restore resilience to our bodies, leadership is about restoring resilience to organizations. So, perhaps today, this shared metaphor will remind us that the spine is both a medical miracle and a corporate necessity for self-belief.
It was with this same inner spine of self-belief that I made my first bold decision at the age of 16. I bought a second-class train ticket and left for Mumbai with no degree, no job, and no backup except a burning desire to define my own path.
In Mumbai,I began learning to sort and polish diamonds. Each stone I polished taught me patience, precision, and perseverance. My first deal with a Japanese buyer earned me Rs 10,000 in commission.
The money never mattered. The moment did — because that was the moment when I realized that my beliefs would have to always outpace my doubts. 2 And that is the truth about entrepreneurship. It never begins with a grand vision. It begins with a spark of conviction.
It begins with the courage to act, even when the future is uncertain. And it begins with the willingness to dream alone and then walk alone, before others join the path.
। Just as I was settling down in Mumbai, I was called back to Ahmedabad to help my brother run his PVC film factory. It was 1981 and I had just turned 19. Managing a factory at this young age taught me what no textbook could. It taught me the resilience needed to manage daily operational challenges.
I got exposed to the complexities of managing people, especially factory workers. And I learnt the challenges of the license raj where just a few companies controlled the landscape and did not want any change, Reflecting back, all of these experiences proved to be invaluable for me, as the most significant decade of India’s transformation was just about to get started and this in turn gave me the platform for transformation that was to reshape my thinking forever.
In 1985, Shri Rajiv Gandhi, then the Prime Minister of our country, began liberalizing our economy by easing import licensing norms. This was a quiet but significant reform. It was as if an economic pressure valve had opened.
We moved fast, becoming early importers of polymers and laying the foundation for our trading house. I was 23. Then came 1991 and India faced one of its darkest hours with just 10 days of foreign exchange reserves left.
Under the decisive leadership of the then Prime Minister Shri PV Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, India launched a historic economic reset. Three words defined it — devaluation, deregulation, and globalization. This marked the fall of many major established corporates who had the protection of the License Raj. But for us first-generation entrepreneurs, it was the spark of reinvention we had been waiting for.
We immediately established a global trading business, which in just 2 years, went on to become India’s largest trading house. The year was 1993 and I had already turned 31! Progress is never linear — and the biggest opportunities almost always emerge on the other side of the hurricanes.
Because in moments when others back off in fear, it is those with courage that step forward and build the bridge to the future. This belief in the future would become the operating DNA of the Adani Group. It was this spirit that carried us into 1995.
Adani Exports, which you now know as Adani Enterprises, went public. The listing came at an extraordinary 14x premium. I was 33. On paper, it was a moment of great validation.
But within me, it also raised a deeper question: Was I trading value? Or was I truly building it? I realized that if we were to shape the future, it was time to make a bold decision. Trading commodities had given us momentum, but it was time to build the very infrastructure that carried those commodities, connected economies and enabled nations to grow. From that moment on, I decided to build.
I decided to stop chasing the tide, and instead, become the coastline that shapes the tide. And I decided to stop reacting to change, and instead, become the foundation that shapes the change. And it all started in Mundra with the objective to build a salt export jetty along with a US partner.
To make a long story short, the partner backed out and we were left to build the jetty by ourselves. Around this time in 1995-96, Gujarat pioneered a Public–Private Partnership policy for port development, aiming to tap private sector capabilities. We dived right in.
Keep in mind, we had never laid a brick before. Almost everyone called it madness. A port in a marshland to be built by a team with no construction experience! The fact is, in October 1998, our Mundra Port commenced operations with its first berth, thereby marking India’s first private port launch.
A few years later, the SEZ policy was announced. Once again, we moved fast. While others saw barren land, we saw 40,000 acres of possibility. Mundra is the manifestation of a belief made real. It is a reminder that, when vision dares, destiny bends.
It is now:
• India’s largest multi-cargo port
• The world’s largest private single-site thermal power plant
• India’s first HVDC transmission line
• India’s largest integrated solar & wind manufacturing hub
• And a cluster of vital industries that include petrochemicals, copper smelters, solar accessories and much more yet to come.
However, the real story of Mundra is not about what we built. It is more about what it built within us. It gave us the courage to look beyond limits, it gave us the belief that barren salt lands could be converted to world-class infrastructure, and it gave us the conviction that if we could make it happen once, we could do it again bigger, faster and bolder.
And what started in our karmabhoomi has now become a pan-India network of dreams, powering our growth that has made us:
• The world’s 2nd-largest solar power company and building the world’s largest single-site hybrid renewable park of 30 GW spanning over 500 square km.
• India’s largest integrated private airport operator with over 25% of India’s passengers and 38% of our nation’s air cargo.
• India’s largest ports and logistics network handling 30% of the nation’s seaborne cargo.
• Most highly integrated energy business encompassing thermal and renewable generation, transmission, distribution, LNG, LPG, CNG, PNG, battery storage, hydrogen trucks, EV charging stations, pumped hydro, and mining • India’s 2nd-largest and most efficient cement manufacturer
• As well as Aerospace and Defence, Data Centres, and Real Estate. One point I would urge you to keep in mind is that our investments are manifestations of our belief in the future of India.
• In her energy grids.
• In her logistics arteries.
• In her industrial backbone. And it is with this conviction that we are preparing for a capital expenditure investment of nearly $100 billion over the next five years.
The scale and pace of this commitment is unprecedented in India’s private sector history as we do our part for strengthening the very spine of India’s rise. • A spine that must be unbreakable.
• A spine that must carry 1.4 billion dreams.
• A spine that tells the world that India’s rise is inevitable.
Let me now shift gears and speak about the role entrepreneurs like us, and potentially like you, can play together. But first, allow me to share a deeply troubling statistic. I was shocked to learn that low back pain is now a leading cause of disability in India, ahead of conditions like diabetes and heart disease.
India is facing a spinal epidemic, a silent crisis far more widespread than global averages. Nearly 1 in 2 adult Indians experiences low back pain every year. This is not merely a health issue. It is a national crisis measured not just in pain, but in lost productivity, mounting healthcare costs, and destroyed dreams. If we are to carry the full weight of our national ambition, we must first heal the spine of our people.
To me, this is not just a call for medical intervention. It is a call for entrepreneurial imagination — and it must have active participation from your side. 5 So today, I would urge you to consider that one of you build India’s first AI-powered spinal diagnostic platform that detects degeneration long before disability.
Another reimagines rural surgery, creating low-cost, high-impact mobile operating theatres that bring hope to villages. A third pioneers the spinal hospital of the future a global centre for robotic surgery, regenerative medicine, and next-gen bio-integrated implants.
As an entrepreneur, I can say that the possibilities are endless — but we must have the belief and the audacity to pioneer this change. That is why I urge you to see yourselves as more than just medical professionals.
And, in return, here is my promise: the Adani Group stands ready to walk with you and we have already embarked on our journey. Three years ago, on my 60th birthday, my family pledged Rs 60,000 crore towards healthcare, education, and skill development.
We did not enter healthcare because it lacked momentum. We entered because the momentum was not enough. The pace of change was out of step with the urgency of future demands.
As the landscape unfolded, one truth stood out — healthcare does not need incremental upgrades. It needs a system-wide redesign. Not an evolution but a revolution rooted in intelligence as well as empathy. We saw the opportunity, not to compete within the system, but to help reimagine it — and build a system that evolves with science, responds to shifting needs, and harnesses the full power of AI without losing sight of the human at the centre.
At the heart of our approach is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary model that breaks traditional silos. Today, clinical care, academic training, and research operate in parallel, but rarely in sync. We envision a system where they converge, each reinforcing the other. Where adjacent sectors like technology, management, and service are not afterthoughts, but part of an integrated fabric delivering outcomes.
Therefore, we are investing in modular, scalable infrastructure, of the kind that can expand rapidly in the face of pandemics or emergencies. We are championing the creation of large, world-class healthcare institutes that bring together innovation, patient care, and applied learning under one roof.
We also believe that academic training must evolve. So, our focus is on fostering doctors who not only heal but also lead with skills in robotics, AI, systems thinking, and healthcare management. Their education must go beyond anatomy to include empathy, ethics, and enterprise. We also realize that we cannot speak of transformation without making stronger the spine of the system that comes from our nursing and paramedical forces.
Hence, we are also investing in building top-tier training institutes and establishing rigorous protocols to ensure that quality becomes a habit, not an exception.
Finally, we must reimagine how healthcare is financed by placing people and not paperwork at the centre. Human-centric insurance products that support and empower families will be a cornerstone of the new healthcare architecture we will do our best to build. We are here to build India’s healthcare for tomorrow and a system that is integrated, intelligent, inclusive and inspired.
And we will be delivering on this promise through the Adani Healthcare Temples — 1,000-bed integrated campuses that we will initiate from Ahmedabad and Mumbai. These are designed to be world-class, affordable, AI-first healthcare ecosystems — and we are proud to have the Mayo Clinic guiding us on the design, implementation, and global standards in medical infrastructure and research. And so, in closing, let me leave you with my final thoughts: If you dream of a med-tech breakthrough — Go for it! If you can imagine a spinal care revolution — Go for it!
If you want to serve India at scale and with empathy — Go for it! We are committed to being — your believers, your partners, your investors. India cannot rise if her people cannot stand. And her people cannot stand without you. The spine you save today may belong to the engineer who designs tomorrow’s bridges, the farmer who feeds our cities, the scientist who invents our next vaccine, or the entrepreneur who builds our next billion-dollar company. So let us stand tall.
Let us stand together. And let us build the backbone of a great nation.
