Personal Profile
Velagapudi Ramakrishna was an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer, industrialist, and philanthropist. He started the KCP (Krishna Commercial Products) group of companies in 1941 with a co-operative sugar factory in Andhra Pradesh.[1] He was a pioneering industrialist in the erstwhile Madras State.
Ramakrishna was born in a Telugu-speaking Kamma[2] family to Velagapudi Venkata Subbayya Choudary in 1896 in the village Bellamvaripalem (Nagaram mandal, near Repalle) in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, India. He studied at Oxford University and acquired B.Sc. and M.A. degrees. His father (pre-adoption surname: Katragadda) originally came from Tellapadu, Maddipadu Mandal, in Prakasam District.
Ramakrishna died in 1968 and was survived by two sons and a daughter: V. Maruthi Rao, V. Lakshmana Dutt, and Rajeshwari Ramakrishnan.Ramakrishna's second son, V. L. Dutt, a past chairman of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI),[5][6][7][8] is the current chairman and managing director of KCP Limited.[9] His wife, Indira Dutt, is a daughter of the Raja of Muktyala and the President of the World Telugu Federation.[10] Ramakrishna's daughter, Smt. Rajeswari Ramakrishnan, is the managing director of Jeypore Sugar Company Limited. Her son R. Prabhu is the Congress MP from the Nilgiris (Ooty), Tamil Nadu, a five-term Member of Parliament [11] and a former Union minister in India.
The Murali Mohan Charitable Trust[8] provides free education for people who secure 85% in both SSC and intermediate and below 10,000 rank in EAMCET or any other preferred entrance tests. The students will be taken into consideration only after full-fledged screening for their financial status. Since its inception the trust has adopted nearly 1,000 students of engineering and medicine.
Memorial institutions
The Velagapudi Ramakrishna Siddhartha Engineering College, near Vijayawada has been posthumously named after him.
He also funded the VSR & NVR College[13] in Tenali and the Sri Velagapudi Ramakrishna Memorial College in Nagaram, Guntur district.
The Andhra Chamber of Commerce building in Chennai[15] has also been named after Velagapudi Ramakrishna.
V Ramakrishna Polytechnic in Thiruvottiyur, Near Chennai is an institution within KCP campus and is named in memory of Velagapudi Ramakrishna.