The income-tax department has been calling up brokers, who have been calling up colleagues. Even the Pune Stock Exchange Executive Director Manish Rangari said he didn’t know the Pune-based low-key, high networth individual who has picked up a 10 per cent stake in white goods major Videocon Appliances. Just who is Ashok Kumar Parmar?We spoke to Parmar, who spent the whole of Wednesday in Mumbai, as he was driving back home to Pune. To Pimpri-Chinchwad, to be precise. He is a 53-year-old relatively unknown builder operating in the manufacturing hub of Pune. None of Pune’s famous building fraternity appears to know him. ‘‘I haven’t heard of him,’’ said Vilas Parmar of the Parmar Group. Ditto for all the other prominent builders we spoke to.Ashok Kumar Parmar got into the construction business in 1982 and his small company — Parmar Builders — has seven projects to its name, all in the Pimpri-Chinchwad area. ‘‘I started as a clerk in a company on a salary of Rs 150 and as a side business ran a small shop which stored everything, from cutlery to electrical goods. In the 1980s, I shifted to construction, but never took up more than one project at a time”. Parmar says he has been taking a keen interest in the stock market for the last five years, picking up shares in lesser known companies, like Elecon Engineering. Then he bought shares worth Rs 7 crore of Pune-based Indian Hume Pipes, which manufactures pipes for water supply projects. And began investing the same amount in Videocon Appliances. Last Friday, he crossed the 10 per cent mark in Videocon and now wants to be on the company’s board.Ask him why he is playing the stock market and he claims: ‘‘I want to diversify. Who wants to stay on in the mafia-tainted building industry? I want to build up enough capital — maybe the association with a company will help — to set up some other venture.’’Prod him a little further and he explains he has taken the stock market path to growth to leave something tangible for his three ‘‘B-Tech/MBA (two IIM-educated)’’ sons. ‘‘As they were growing up, I took a decision that they must never get into the construction business”.
