Dharm Patel is an Ahmedabad-based entrepreneur and civil engineer. He trained at CEPT University and graduated with Honours. The work he has built since then has moved across real estate, renewable energy, solid waste management, software development, and education. Each of those fields, to him, is really working on the same problem: what does it take to build something that holds up over time?

The CETP project is where that question gets most real. Industrial clusters produce effluent. When that effluent is managed carelessly, it ends up in soil and water that families and farmers depend on. His work on the Common Effluent Treatment Plant is guided by a conviction he does not think is complicated: industries have to grow and the environment around them has to be protected, and those two things are one responsibility, not two competing ones.

Mr. Patel brings a hands-on approach to leadership. He engages directly with the people and problems a project involves, asks the questions others may overlook, and arrives at decisions that are considered rather than convenient. Those who have worked with him recognise a consistent pattern: thorough in his thinking, measured in his judgement, and genuinely invested in outcomes beyond his own.

His interests outside of work, reading across disciplines and travel, inform how he approaches professional challenges. Exposure to different ideas and contexts has shaped in him a habit of questioning assumptions early, which he considers as important in business as any technical skill.