The Jain family's tryst with business started more than 90 years ago. In the 1920s, Shri Siddhomal Jain established Siddhomal and Sons, a successful paper and newsprint trading business. In the 1960s, his son Devendra Kumar Jain, a History Hons. graduate from New Delhi's prestigious St. Stephen's College, decided to go beyond the trading business and become an industrialist. He saw great promise in the business of extracting, liquefying and selling gases from natural air, as these industrial gases were widely used in the steel, manufacturing and healthcare sectors - all of which were flourishing in India at that time. He finally established Industrial Oxygen Co. Pvt. Ltd. in Pune in 1963.