I was a few months into my first print job at a business magazine. Our editorial meeting held every Monday evening would be quite the democratic brainstorming session. A story pitch had to first be convincing enough for almost everyone in the room. Everyone could voice their opinions and question it.
On July 29, 2019, when the meeting was on, Kannada channels started flashing the news that V G Siddhartha, founder of the iconic Café Coffee Day (CCD) chain, had gone missing. Details were still sketchy. The first thing to cross one’s mind was, “How can a prominent businessman go missing near Mangaluru?” Of course nobody presumed him to be dead then.
Siddhartha’s body was found on July 31, 2019 in the Netravati River.
DH File Photo
Trying to reach the police commissioner for any clarity proved to be difficult that day. For someone not in the daily news cycle, I had the luxury of waiting and watching how the situation unfolded. By then, TV news channels, with bureaus in Mangaluru, had already activated their 24X7 storytelling mode.
As evening turned to night, the rumours of Siddhartha’s suicide became stronger. By 9 pm, it was more or less accepted that Siddhartha had jumped into the Netravati river from the bridge, even though, by that time, no one seemed to have seen him do it. It was still hard to believe.
His death was confirmed in the wee hours of July 31 when the search operation resulted in the discovery of his body. At that time, the basic outline of the case was that Siddhartha had taken too many loans and failed to meet his payment commitments. In his death note, he entirely took the blame for all the business outcomes.
Hundreds gathered on the roadside in Banakal, Chikkamagaluru, to catch a final glimpse of V G Siddhartha during his funeral procession.
DH File Photo
Prosenjit Dutta, editor of the fortnightly where I worked, called to tell me that this would warrant a cover story. While that story was in progress, the focus now was on other developments — Who will run the company? What was the real debt of the group? How much did it owe to banks and NBFCs (non-banking financial companies)? A few months after his death, the trading of its shares had been suspended at the stock exchanges. It all looked like one big mess that was left behind for the board to handle. The company’s board of directors looked clueless on many of the above questions at the time of his death.
For someone who had built a brand like CCD, Siddhartha taking his life seemed an unlikely and desperate move. To the curious me, it felt more important to get to know the person behind all the material posturing.
Before tragedy struck
Growing up as a ’90s kid in Bangalore, the earliest memory of CCD was not just the cafe near Manuvana in Vijayanagar but also the Fresh and Ground outlet near my school in Basaveshwaranagar. These outlets, which preceded the cafe chain, were the company’s foray into retail sales of coffee powder. From here, my family would buy 70:30 coffee powder for our daily consumption.
After I moved to business journalism in 2010, I covered the cafe chain on and off. Back then, they were in fundraising mode. They were attracting private equity investors like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, branching out to other businesses like furniture making, and at the same time expanding their presence and experimenting with formats and offerings to take on the famed international competition — Starbucks. Through a joint venture with the Tata group, Starbucks was looking to enter the Indian market to plug into the cafe culture established by incumbents such as CCD, Barista and Costa Coffee.
Though Siddhartha was the face of the cafe chain, he rarely interacted with media houses. Other top level executives, like
K Ramakrishnan, did the talking. The Coffee Day empire consisted of financial services, and real estate and logistics businesses, but its brand recollection was always the coffee and cafe business.
By early 2019, the coffee chain was in the news for multiple reasons. Siddhartha had stepped down from the board of Mindtree in March 2018, sparking rumours of an impending stake sale that he and his companies held in the midcap IT firm. Then there were reports of talks with Coca Cola for a part stake sale of the coffee business. There was also talk that he was selling one of his coveted real estate projects, Global Village Tech Park, to one of the world’s largest alternative asset management companies, Blackstone. The urgency of Siddhartha to cash out was obvious by then. The only deal he could conclude before his death was the stake sale of Mindtree to infrastructure giant Larsen & Toubro in March that year.
Meeting Siddhartha’s mother
For our research, we had to go beyond informal chats. When we approached Malavika Hegde, his wife, she politely turned us down. But Dr Pradeep Kenjige, director for R&D at Coffee Day Global Ltd, decided to engage with us. Kenjige is an author and also the father of American professional cricketer, Nosthush Kenjige. A coffee planter himself, he provided rare insights into the family. He recalled how he had closely interacted with Siddhartha’s father, Gangaiah Hegde.
A Gandhian and a socialist, Siddhartha’s father was an aberration when it came to large estate owners in the region. Kenjige recalls how Gangaiah Hegde paid the highest bonuses to his workers during festivals and lent his voice in support of small coffee plantation owners’ issues and difficulties when they took them to the Coffee Board of India and state government authorities.
Kenjigi and I set out from Mudigere to the Chetanahalli coffee estate to meet Siddhartha’s octogenarian mother Vasanthi Hegde. She still lives there tending to the coffee estates that the family owns. After driving through picturesque estates, we reached the gates of Siddhartha’s family home, perched on a somewhat table top hill.
It is a beautiful estate home with large, wall-to-wall wooden French windows, impeccably clean and tastefully decorated. Right at their doorstep is a bird’s-eye view of vast expanses of greenery.
True to Malnad hospitality, she first insisted on feeding us — hot masala dosey that her house help had made.
She was married at the age of 17. In the early days, the estate was an isolated and frightening place. “When ‘Aiyya’ (which is what everyone called Gangaiah) was away overnight for any work, I would be scared to stay up after dark. With no electricity and nothing but dense forests for kilometres, it was unsettling,” she recalls. She would go to bed at sunset and pull the blankets over her head.
The eminent Kannada poet, Kuppalli Venkatappa Putappa, better known by his pen name Kuvempu, was a distant relative of both families. Vasanthi had the opportunity to closely interact with him since her childhood. Kuvempu’s philosophy and reverence for nature, and the influence of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Vivekananda also left a mark on her thinking.
Marxist leanings
In the living room, I spotted a picture of Siddhartha receiving a business award from L K Advani. As she spoke of her son, her composure and calmness struck me the most. Siddhartha’s father passed away days after him. A woman who had lost her son and husband in quick succession still stood strong.
The free flowing conversation gave us insights into the early life of Siddhartha, his industriousness, the dreams he had for his children, his outlook towards his large extended family and his sense of duty to the community. We gathered that during his youth, Siddhartha was deeply influenced by the nationalist spirit.
Siddhartha had joined the National Cadet Corps and completed his ‘B’ certificate (a certification that gives a candidate bonus marks if he/she appears for any of the defence job exams). He was tall and physically fit and had learnt how to shoot, in the hope that he would join the army. His parents did not discourage him — they told him to pursue his dreams. Siddhartha was quite shattered when he failed the entrance exam to the military academy. He would bring this up time and time again with some regret in his interviews. If he had managed to join the armed forces, the story of his life may have been totally different.
Perhaps his fascination for the army may be traced to his mother — Vasanthi’s dream as a young girl was to marry an army officer. “I used to tell my son that army life was good. In addition to being of service to the nation, I liked their lifestyle and their discipline.”
Though he grew his business on the back of the liberalisation policy of the ’90s, in his early days, he leaned towards communism. At the Indian Entrepreneurship Summit held in August 2016 at IIT Kanpur,
Siddhartha talked about his beliefs. “I was very sure I’ll become a Communist party member. But I started realising after reading Soviet history that when people come to power, they forget the basic principle of why they came to power. Karl Marx’s principles were fantastic and I believed those days that capitalists are crooks and I still believe we are not very good people. I thought I would become like Robin Hood — take capital
from the rich and give it to the poor. By the final year of my degree, (I) started realising that there is no money to be made in this country at all.”
Political connections
Though he was married to the elder daughter of the late Karnataka chief minister S M Krishna, Siddhartha kept a low profile. Krishna’s wife was also a distant relative of the Hegdes. His acquaintances and donations cut across party lines like any good businessman in India.
Chikkamagaluru BJP MLC C T Ravi recalled how after graduating from college and having just joined the BJP, he had gone to meet Siddhartha on his bike. “Siddhartha found a place in my heart because he was willing to spend time with a person who was a nobody then,” he said.
During S M Krishna’s tenure, in 1999, he played a major role in getting together the right people to set up the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF). In his biography ‘Smritivahini’, Krishna writes that he sought Siddhartha’s help to convince Nandan Nilekani to meet him and get him to head the task force.
The challenges
What turned out to be quite a challenge was connecting with his friends from his college days in Mangaluru. One of them was deeply involved in his business. Phone calls and messages went unanswered. At the same time what proved to be even more difficult was getting the Dalal Street folks to talk. Those close to Siddhartha during his Mumbai days chose not to respond, though they were active on social media.
Some who had early business associations with him willingly spoke to us, giving us insights that were completely off the record. However, without enough to corroborate those insights, we were not able include them in our research.
Surprisingly some of the bankers and other lenders were sympathetic towards Siddhartha — seeing him as a victim of circumstances rather than as a wilful defaulter. It was largely his charm and humility that had gone a long way in sustaining relationships, which helped him borrow more and more. Later, while the investigation by SEBI into Coffee Day Enterprises and Mysore Amalgamated Coffee Estates Ltd (a private company held by the promoter) definitively established fund diversion, the National Financial Reporting Authority’s investigation of the group companies’ auditors threw light on how such diversion took place.
Where it stands today
Today, the Coffee Day group resembles a standalone coffee and hospitality business from its earlier presence across finance, real estate and logistics sectors. After his death, the non-core businesses were monetised to pare debt. The tech park was sold to Blackstone and Salarpuria Sattva, the Way2Wealth finance business was sold to the Chennai-based Sriram group, Sical Logistics was acquired by Pristine Malwa Logistics Park Private Limited.
Prior to his death in 2018, Coffee Day had nearly 1,700 cafes, 500-plus kiosks, more than 400 Fresh & Ground outlets, and over 47,500 vending machines placed in offices of different companies. Compared to that as per the company’s disclosure, at the end of September 30, 2025, the cafe count stood at 423 while the vending machine business has fared much better with 55,733 machines.
The cafe culture in India is now drastically different. CCD now contends not just with Starbucks, but also with homegrown startups like Blue Tokai and Third Wave Coffee Roasters as well as global brand names such as Pret a Manger and Tim Hortons. For CCD to regain its glory, perhaps those who run it will need to rediscover who it serves, given that the population that holds CCD nostalgia has already moved up the value chain. For it to grow, the company would need cash infusion but then in its current form, getting an external investor or raising debt seems difficult.
For me, the business learnings were many. Coffee Day was a brand built on Siddhartha’s passion, hunger and need to prove to the world that he had it in him to match up to the Mumbai conglomerates. However, in practice, the way he ran his companies holds a lesson about what happens when professionalism gets sidelined. Talent hiring on the basis of acquaintance brought with it its own incompetence — boards of his private companies largely consisted of relatives and friends. A lack of dissenting voices meant no checks and balances were in place. While this may have been by design and choice, it serves well as a cautionary tale of how running a business this way is suicidal in the long run.
(The author spent four years researching and writing ‘Coffee King — The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Café Coffee Day Founder V G Siddhartha’, along with co-author Prosenjit Datta)