Owner of the famous spice company MDH Masala Mahashay Dharampal Gulati passed away at the age of 97 on Thursday morning. Gulati was undergoing treatment at Chanan Devi Hospital in Delhi for the last three weeks. He suffered cardiac arrest on the Thursday morning of 26 November 2020. He died at 5:38 AM on 3 December 2020.
Dharampal Gulati was born on March 27, 1923 in Sialkot (now Pakistan). After Partition, he and his family came to India with barely Rs 1,500. Initially, he started work as a tangewala (horse-cart puller) but soon his family gathered enough resources to open a spice shop in Karol Bagh’s Ajmal Khan Road. The ‘Mahashian Di Hatti’ (MDH) was founded by his late father Mahashay Chunni Lal Gulati.
Gulati, a class 05 dropout, was among highest earning CEO in the FMCG sector, taking home a salary of above Rs 25 crore in 2018. Gulati donated nearly 90% of his salary to charity under the banner of the Mahashay Chunni Lal Charitable Trust. The Trust operates a 250-beds hospital in Delhi, along with a mobile hospital for slum dwellers and four schools.
In 2019, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the country’s third-highest civilian award.