Kochouseph Chittilappilly

He is the founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of V-Guard Industries Ltd and a chain of amusement parks called Wonderla. K. Chittilappilly Foundation, a non profit organization founded by him is engaged in charitable and philanthropic activities. Chittilappilly is a recipient of the Rashtriya Samman award from the Government of India for being among the highest taxpayers and the Newsmaker of the Year 2011 award from Malayala Manorama. As the chairman of the Stray Dog Free movement, he has advocated for government action to address the "menace" of stray dogs in his home state of Kerala, and has criticized legislation forbidding the killing of stray dogs.

In 2011, Chittilapilly donated one of his kidneys to a stranger, a truck driver, and started an organ donor chain - where one of the family members of the recipient had to donate an organ thereby forming a donor chain. As a part of the program, Chittilapilly donated one of his kidneys to a truck driver, becoming the first depositor with the Kidney Federation of India (KFI) and is now closely associated with the movement.

Chittilapilly is a recipient of Rashtriya Samman from the Government of India for being the highest taxpayer in India. He was selected as the Malayala Manorama Newsmaker of the Year (Manorama News) 2011, the year he became an organ donor, the award reaching him in 2012. He is also a recipient of awards such as Millennium Businessman of Kerala from Business Deepika, Tourism Man of the Year 2000 from Destination Kerala, Manager of the Year 2000 from the Travancore Management Association and Tourism Man of the Year 2011 from the Association of Tourism Trade Organisations, India (ATTOI).

Chittilappilly published his first book, Practical Wisdom, in 2005, which is an account of practical management techniques he derived from his personal experiences. Two more books in the same series followed, Practical Wisdom 1: In Real Life and Management (2010) and Practical Wisdom 2: In Real Life and Management (2012). In between, he published his autobiographical work, Ormakkilivathil (Down Memory Lane) in 2011 which had a foreword written by renowned Malayalam writer, T. Padmanabhan.

Chittilapilly is reported to have introduced a new business model by total product outsourcing coupled with in-house quality control when his factories were shut down following a workers' strike in the 1980s. Later, diversifying the business, he started the first water theme park in the state of Kerala under the name, Veegaland, in 2000. Another park on a larger scale, Wonderla, was subsequently started in Bengaluru. Veegaland has since been renamed as Wonderla Kochi, in an effort to establish the name as a brand. Veegaland Developers is another venture by Kochouseph Chittillappilly that is in to construction of ready to occupy flats and apartments in Cochin

In 1977, he founded V-Guard Industries, a small electronics manufacturing unit for the production of voltage stabilizers with a capital of ₹ 100,000. The company which had 2 employees at its modest manufacturing facility in Thrissur at inception, grew over the years to become the largest selling stabilizer brand in India. The company claims to have 500 distributors, 3000 dealers, 20,000 retailers and a network of service centers across India supporting a product range composed of Pumps and Motors, Electric and Solar Water Heaters, Wiring Cables, UPS, and Ceiling Fans. The company has an Indian market share of 20 percent in UPS segment, 15 percent in pumps, 12 percent in water heaters and 7 percent in wiring cables segments.

Kochouseph Chittilappilly was born to C. O. Thomas in Parappur, a suburb of Thrissur in the south Indian state of Kerala in 1950. His early schooling was at the local church school after which he graduated from Christ College, Irinjalakuda and followed it with a master's degree in Physics from St. Thomas College, Thrissur in 1970. His career kickstarted in 1973 at Telics, a Thiruvananthapuram based electronics company manufacturing voltage stabilizers and emergency lamps, in the capacity of a supervisor where he worked for three years.