The Boy Who Worked in a Match Factory After School Grew Up to Build Two Rs 1,000-Crore Firms

Growing up in Villampatti village near Sivakasi in southern Tamil Nadu, K. Pandiarajan worked daily in his grandfather’s match factory after school hours before rising to become one of India’s leading HR entrepreneurs.

He steered his first company, Ma Foi, launched with an investment of just Rs 60,000, to a turnover of Rs 1,000 crore.

In 1992, Pandiarajan co-founded Ma Foi, along with his wife Latha, with just Rs 60,000 (Photos: Special Arrangement)

He later forayed into politics, becoming the blue-eyed boy of AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalithaa and serving as a minister in her cabinet, before returning to the HR space with his second innings through CIEL HR Services, which recorded a turnover of Rs 1,500 crore in the last financial year.

Fondly known as Ma Foi Pandiarajan, he is among the rare entrepreneurs in India to have built two companies that both crossed the Rs 1,000-crore turnover mark.


“My childhood was spent in a village called Villampatti, near Sivakasi. My grandfather, Sankara Nadar, was my first role model. He was a small-time entrepreneur who started a safety match factory. The entire family worked there along with 10–12 workers from nearby villages. That was my first exposure to entrepreneurship,” shares Pandiarajan.

His grandfather had earlier worked as a cook with Dr. Santosham, a well-known doctor in Chennai. After ten years of service, Dr. Santosham gave him Rs 5,000 and sent him back to his native place. With that money, he started a match factory, which he named Pandiaraj Match Factory.

“It was founded in the very month I was born,” recalls Pandiarajan, who had lost his father when he was just three months old and grew up in his maternal grandparents’ house as part of a large joint family of about 30–40 members.

“After school, right from my elementary days, I would always go to my grandfather’s match factory. I used to do things like arranging matchsticks, bundling them, packing the boxes and all those menial works. I actually enjoyed carrying bundles and helping around. It was a place where everybody worked together, so there was nothing like employer and employee.”

Pandiarajan launched CIEL HR Services in 2015, now a Rs 1,500-crore turnover HR firm with 85 offices across the country

Growing up in a joint family also left a lasting impression on him. “It was full of sharing, caring, and give-and-take, unlike today’s nuclear families. My grandmother, Sornammal, was the second great influence in my life. Though she had studied only up to Class 3, she instilled immense confidence in me and made me believe that I was destined for bigger things.”

Pandiarajan graduated in Electronics and Communication from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, in 1981 and later earned an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur, in 1984.

“My first job was with British Oxygen in Calcutta. I worked there for six years, travelling extensively. It was during this period that I met my wife, Latha, who was then a chartered accountant with S.B. Billimoria. She was actually the auditor for British Oxygen,” recalls Pandiarajan.

Though both were working in North India at the time, they hailed from the same region in southern Tamil Nadu. They belonged to the same community but different religions.

“We married in 1989. Latha comes from a respected Christian family from Nalumavadi. We had both Hindu and Christian weddings, plus a registered marriage. We were very clear that neither of us needed to convert, and we respected each other’s faiths,” he shares.

Another strong influence in his life was his father-in-law. “My father-in-law, Manuel Thangaraj, was a Deputy Chief Engineer in the Railways. He filled the void of a father figure in my life and became another important influence on me,” Pandiarajan reflects.

In 1990, Pandiarajan left British Oxygen to join Dr. V. Krishnamurthy, widely known as the “turnaround man” of India. Dr. Krishnamurthy had revived several public sector undertakings and left his mark as the head of Maruti, SAIL, and BHEL.

“He made me Head of HR for about 12 companies he managed under the Bharat Technologies umbrella,” recalls Pandiarajan.

“It was a phenomenal experience. I handled HR across engineering, IT, manufacturing, and even overseas subsidiaries in Singapore and Europe. I also set up engineering staffing services in Singapore. That was my entry into the HR services industry.”

But the good run came to an abrupt end. “Unfortunately, during the Harshad Mehta scam, Dr. Krishnamurthy was arrested on political grounds, and the group’s funding collapsed. At that point, I was in Singapore, and suddenly I had to rethink my future.”

In August 1992, Pandiarajan and his wife Latha co-founded Ma Foi Management Consultants in Chennai with just Rs 60,000. They began operations in a modest 1,000 sq. ft. house in Nungambakkam that belonged to his father-in-law.

“At first it was just the two of us, but we built it step by step,” he recalls. Every year they opened new offices and soon they had offices in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Baroda, Delhi, Kolkata, Pune, Mumbai, and Vizag.

Their growth model was unusual for its time. Instead of depending on banks, they raised small amounts of equity from friends, relatives, and classmates, with investments ranging from as little as Rs 3,000 to as much as Rs 17 lakh.

“We consistently paid them a 20 percent dividend. In many ways, it was crowdsourcing before the term was even invented,” says Pandiarajan. By 1996, Ma Foi had crossed 100 shareholders and became a public limited company, though still closely held.

By 2000, revenues had touched Rs 10 crore with a profit of Rs 50 lakh. Venture capitalists valued the firm at Rs 100 crore, and Ma Foi became one of the first HR companies in India to raise VC funding.

Over the next decade, the company grew rapidly, crossing Rs 100 crore in 2004 when Vedior took a majority stake, and eventually touching Rs 1,000 crore in revenues by 2010.

In 2007, Vedior itself was acquired by the Dutch multinational Randstad. “It was a hostile takeover that took nearly two years to resolve because of anti-trust issues in Europe. By 2011, the name was officially changed to Ma Foi Randstad, and I continued as Chairman,” he notes.

When Pandiarajan eventually quit Randstad, the company had revenues of Rs 1,000 crore, 2,000 permanent employees, and nearly 50,000 contract staff. Randstad has since grown into the world’s largest HR firm and part of the Fortune 500.

Alongside his business journey, Pandiarajan was steadily cultivating a political career, which started with the BJP, but took a major turn when he entered the Tamil Nadu Assembly in 2011 as a DMDK MLA.
In the years that followed, he would align with Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK and rise to become a cabinet minister.

As an AIADMK minister, Pandiarajan managed key portfolios, including School Education and Youth Welfare

Earlier, in 2000, he initially joined the BJP, first serving as District President in Chennai, and later heading the IT Cell and the Commerce Cell at the state level. He was also part of the BJP’s National Council, working alongside leaders such as Dr. Tamilisai Soundararajan.

By 2007, he moved to Vijayakanth’s DMDK, where he spent five years, contesting a parliamentary election in 2009 – which he lost - and winning a seat in the Tamil Nadu Assembly in 2011 from Virudhunagar.

In the Assembly, his articulate interventions caught the attention of AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalithaa. “She appreciated the way I presented points in debates. Over time, she developed a personal liking for me,” he recalls. Though elected on a DMDK ticket, he led a breakaway group of nine MLAs that aligned with AIADMK, strengthening his ties with Jayalalithaa.

In the 2016 Assembly election, Pandiarajan contested as an AIADMK candidate from Avadi, one of Tamil Nadu’s largest constituencies with over five lakh voters.

The counting turned into a cliffhanger, and he eventually scraped through by a margin of just 1,395 votes after several recounts. “Amma was following the results closely. Mine was the penultimate result to be declared that evening, and she was delighted when I won,” he recalls.

She quickly rewarded him with one of the most powerful portfolios in her cabinet - School Education, Youth Welfare, Sports, Art and Culture, Museums, Archaeology, and Libraries - commanding an annual budget of Rs 28,000 crore. She also made him the first official spokesperson of the AIADMK, where he often handled as many as eight media briefings a day.

Jayalalithaa, known to be hard to please, was unusually warm towards him and his family. “Amma was very fond of me and especially of Latha. She often enquired about my children. She valued my media presence and would watch my debates on TV every night, giving me feedback the next day. I also gifted her books regularly, which she loved,” he shares.

But the political equations in the party changed after Jayalalithaa’s sudden passing in December 2016. Within six months of becoming a minister, he was forced to navigate a turbulent political landscape, first siding with O. Panneerselvam during his revolt, and later uniting with Edappadi K. Palaniswami.

Under EPS, he was given a lighter portfolio, Tamil Official Language, Tamil Culture, Museums, and Archaeology. Though his protocol rank remained high, the ministry was far smaller compared to Education. “This was also the phase when I gradually shifted focus back to entrepreneurship,” he reflects.

In 2011, after stepping aside from Randstad’s core operations, he had already started three ventures under the Ma Foi brand - Strategy Consultants, Analytics & Research, and Education & Skilling.

But the real turning point came in 2015, when he launched CIEL HR Services along with his former Ma Foi colleagues, Aditya Mishra, Santosh Nair, and Rajiv Krishnan.

Over the last few years, CIEL has grown rapidly, from Rs 300 crore four years ago to Rs 2,000 crore today. With 1,400 full-time staff and 50,000 associates spread across 85 offices in 40 cities, the company now ranks among India’s top eight HR firms and aims to be in the top five soon, with plans for an imminent public issue.

Alongside business, Pandiarajan has also invested in social ventures. The Sonammal Education Trust, named after his grandmother, has supported over 5,000 students with scholarships since 1992 and has funded sports infrastructure in government schools and green initiatives like lake rejuvenation in Avadi.

The Ma Foi Foundation focuses on skilling programmes, working with corporates such as Mahindra and L&T and central government schemes like DDU-GKY and PM Daksh. “So far, we have skilled more than one lakh youth,” he notes with pride.

Latha Pandiarajan, a chartered accountant, co-founded Ma Foi alongside her husband in 1992

Family remains central to his story. His daughter Sunila, an MBA from HEC Paris, works with Publicis in Paris, handling global brands like Tesla. His son Suhas is a pilot with IndiGo, based in Chennai.

“They are both following their passions now. Whether they join CIEL in the future is their choice,” he says.

Now 66, Pandiarajan has shifted his energy back to business, keeping politics in the background, though he continues to remain in the AIADMK. His mission is to take CIEL public and establish it as a leading deep-tech HR firm.

“But what truly matters to us,” he reflects, “is that over the last 34 years, Latha and I have been part of generating jobs for more than eight lakh people. That is what gives us the greatest satisfaction.” - ©TWL