Keshub Mahindra, an Indian industrialist who constructed a household metal and automotive enterprise into an unlimited multinational conglomerate, however whose repute was marred by his conviction for negligence in a poison gasoline leak that killed hundreds of individuals in Bhopal in 1984, died on April 12. He was 99.

His firm, Mahindra Group, confirmed his demise in a press release. His daughter Yuthica Mahindra stated he died at his dwelling in Mumbai.

Under Mr. Mahindra’s management, the corporate expanded quickly from its core companies of metal buying and selling and constructing Willys jeeps to grow to be a conglomerate with companies in additional than 20 industries, together with cloud and community expertise, hospitality, renewable vitality, logistics, monetary providers and actual property.

He made worldwide partnerships with firms like Peugeot, British Telecom and Mitsubishi, serving to these firms construct companies in India whereas taking Mahindra world. He didn’t neglect Mahindra’s core enterprise as he expanded, and in time the corporate grew to become a number one car producer in India, recognized for S.U.V.s, and a world purveyor of tractors.

Today, the Mahindra Group employs greater than 260,000 individuals in additional than 100 nations and has annual revenues of $19 billion. Mr. Mahindra’s private fortune was price $1.2 billion, in keeping with Forbes.

Mr. Mahindra stated there have been two fundamental keys to constructing a profitable multifaceted worldwide enterprise: to keep away from arbitrarily forcing new administration on companies that he had purchased, and to know when to stroll away from a foul deal.

“When acquiring some of these businesses, we make sure that the senior management of that group stays with us,” Mr. Mahindra informed an interviewer at Harvard Business School in 2013. “We make very few changes.”

And, he added, “We are not afraid of getting out of a business if it doesn’t meet global standards.”

He additionally served on company boards of main Indian firms, like Tata Steel and ICICI Bank. It was his position as chairman of a type of boards, Union Carbide India Ltd., that concerned him within the Bhopal catastrophe.

In the early morning of Dec. 3, 1984, 40 tons of deadly methyl isocyanate gas spewed out of a Union Carbide pesticide manufacturing facility perilously close to densely populated neighborhoods in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh State in central India.

More than 3,000 individuals are thought to have died that evening, many whereas they slept, and plenty of extra — estimates range from 10,000 to more than 15,000 — died from longer-term results of the chemical publicity. Hundreds of hundreds have been sickened or injured.

Activists and the Indian authorities blamed lax administration on the plant for the accident. There had been quite a few reviews of accidents and harmful situations on the manufacturing facility earlier than the catastrophe.

The firm blamed sabotage and contended that native officers have been accountable for administration of the plant.

Mr. Mahindra, V.P. Gokhale, who was Union Carbide India’s managing director, and Union Carbide’s chairman, Warren Anderson, an American citizen who had flown to India after the catastrophe, have been arrested on Dec. 7. They have been charged with seven offenses, essentially the most critical of which have been legal conspiracy and culpable murder.

Mr. Anderson was launched in a matter of hours on bail on the situation that he depart the nation instantly. Mr. Mahindra and Mr. Gokhale have been launched on bail the next week.

The Indian authorities filed a lawsuit in opposition to Union Carbide in 1986, and three years later India’s Supreme Court ordered the company to pay $470 million in damages, with every sufferer getting a mean of $550. As a part of the settlement, the federal government dropped legal prices in opposition to Mr. Anderson, who died in 2014 with out dealing with trial in India.

The prosecution of Mr. Mahindra and 7 different former executives, all of them Indian, dragged on for greater than 1 / 4 century, slowed down by an inefficient court docket system. In 2010, all eight were convicted of death by negligence. (By that point, one defendant had died.) They have been every fined about $2,100 and sentenced to 2 years in jail however have been launched on bail.

Satinath Sarangi, an advocate for the victims of the catastrophe, described the verdict afterward as “the world’s worst industrial disaster reduced to a traffic accident.”

In the 2013 interview with Harvard Business School, Mr. Mahindra argued that as chairman he was not the one working the corporate’s day-to-day affairs and contended that he had been scapegoated.

“How can they pick on a nonexecutive chairman who has no interest in the company capital-wise, who is not empowered to manage the company?” he requested.

Still, he stated, “even today it weighs on my mind, for it was a terrible tragedy. It never should have happened.”

Keshub Mahindra was born on Oct. 9, 1923, in Shimla, then the summer season capital of British-ruled India and now the capital of Himachal Pradesh State, within the nation’s northern reaches.

His father, Kailash Chandra Mahindra, based the metal buying and selling firm that was first referred to as Mahindra & Mohammed collectively together with his brother, Jagdish Chandra Mahindra, and Ghulam Mohammed in 1945.

Mr. Mohammed left the corporate and have become Pakistan’s minister of finance after India’s partition in 1947, and the Mahindra brothers modified the corporate identify to Mahindra & Mahindra.

Keshub Mahindra, who had lately graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, joined the corporate that 12 months. He grew to become chairman in 1963, after his father died and never lengthy after the corporate had expanded into tractors via a cope with International Harvester. The firm now claims to be the world’s largest tractor maker by quantity.

He stepped down in 2012, and his nephew Anand grew to become chairman.

In 1956, Mr. Mahindra married Sudha Varde, who survives him. In addition to his spouse and daughter Yuthica, he’s survived by two different daughters, Uma Malhotra and Leena Labroo; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Mr. Mahindra grew to become a serious philanthropist, focusing a lot of his charitable work on schooling, particularly for girls. The Okay.C. Mahindra Education Trust, based by his father, has helped educate extra than 500,000 underprivileged girls throughout 14 Indian states and has handed out greater than $119 million in grants and scholarships, in keeping with its most recent annual report.

Alain Delaquérière contributed analysis.