But Atul maintains that the oil companies that are Punj's main customers are financially sound.
Atul grew up in Delhi with three siblings (none of whom is involved in the business).
Atul admits that he was lured by the prospect of making a quick buck.
"Most of our people are out-of-towners, " says Atul Kelkar, a manager of Smiles, a Bombay model-training agency.
Atul Gawande of The New Yorker is, from a purely literary standpoint, the most talented writer on health care today.
Ten days short of the deadline a banker at ICICI Bank agreed to provide the guarantee, accepting Atul's word as collateral.
However Dr Atul Gawande, author of "Better - a surgeon's notes on performance", says his intuitive diagnosis saved a woman's life.
BBC: NEWS | Programmes | More Or Less | Diagnosis by computer statistics
"Better services and lower costs, " says Atul Vashistha, chief executive of Neoit, which advises companies on what and where to outsource.
Atul was set to make a killing, but a month later the technology bubble burst and Nomura backed out of the deal.
In a bid to unlink Punj from the notoriously volatile energy sector, Atul has expanded into infrastructure, a crying need in India.
At the Documenta art fair in Kassel, Germany, likewise, two mid-career Indian artists, Atul Dodiya and Sheela Gowda were offered for sale.
"From a zero, I became a hero in the family, " Atul recounts.
In his excellent piece in the New Yorker this week, Atul Gawande spends some time discussing ICU doctor supervision via the electronic ICU system.
FORBES: Guest Post: Is It The Right Time To Introduce Real Supervision Into Medical Practice?
Atul Sobti, boss of Ranbaxy, an Indian generics firm bought last year by Daiichi Sankyo, a Japanese pharmaceutical giant, offers a different reason for scepticism.
The key challenge for Atul is to focus on profitable growth.
Jain's youngest son, Atul, who is overseeing this expansion, discloses that they have been evaluating a bid on a tender to supply water to Mysore in southern India.
Atul, who admits to being "the brash one in the pack, " was keen to study in the U.S. His dad agreed, on the condition that he get married first.
Renowned surgeon Atul Gawande argues that the true frontier of medicine is not knowledge, but execution that healthcare providers fail not at knowing what to do, but at doing what they know.
"There will be real physician shortages if we don't do more to lift the residency cap, " said Dr. Atul Grover, the Association of American Medical Colleges' chief advocacy officer, in a statement.
CNN: Your health care is covered, but who's going to treat you?
Remembering the centuries of colonialism, we might speculate on why British artists don't appear to have been influential here, and it's a generally apolitical array of images, other than two works by Atul Dodiya (b. 1959).
Dr Atul Singham, from the Institute of Child Health in London, also said that he was slightly sceptical about the likely scale of "foetal programming" in child diet until it could be proven in human studies.
Ranbaxy's board, which met Sunday in New Delhi, named Tsutomu Une, a senior Daiichi executive and a director on Ranbaxy's board, as chairman and elevated Atul Sobti, Ranbaxy's chief operating officer since 2007, to CEO and managing director.
Atul Nishar, founder and executive chairman of Hexaware Technologies, an IT firm in Mumbai, felt that a faster sale would benefit not just Satyam but the Indian IT industry, whose image has been blemished by the Satyam fraud.
"We thought we were being responsible by having our medical schools expand to address the doctor shortage, but the federal government has to do its share, too, " said Atul Grover, the chief public policy officer of the medical-college group.
"In the mining sector, the recent sharp decline in commodity prices has caused profits to deteriorate significantly, such that miners are now spending more in capital expenditure than they are earning, " Credit Suisse analysts Damien Boey and Atul Lele said in a note.
Atul Hatwal, director of cross-party group the Migration Matters Trust, said the change was about promoting a "shared understanding of the country we live in", and provided the tests were "fair, not punitive" they should encourage a greater level of integration between new and existing citizens.
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