Some of India's wealthiest are also among the richest in the world according to the latest list of billionaires compiled by Forbes.
With the economy well and truly opened and the stock market booming, India produced 168 new billionaires in 2006-07. As a result, the membership in the billionaire club has touched 533 with a combined wealth of Rs1.23 million billion (about Dh114.8 thousand billion). The top five club members are worth over Rs50 billion each. There are now 48 Indians who are dollar billionaires.
Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani is estimated to have a net worth of $20.1 billion (about Dh73.8 billion). His brother, Anil, is second with a net worth of $18.2 billion (about Dh66.8 billion). Sunil Mittal, the promoter of Bharti Airtel, is at number three with a net worth of $9.5 billion (about Dh34.8 billion).
Of the 46 who became billionaires through initial public offerings, the top seven are real-estate developers, led by K.P. Singh of DLF. Singh was ranked fourth in the compilation of India's richest after his real estate conglomerate came out with its mega initial public offering.
In the Forbes list of world's billionaires, the 54 Indian billionaires listed have a combined net worth of about $368 billion (about Dh1,351 billion).
Here's a brief look at some of the top Indians who figure in this list.
Lakshmi N Mittal
Ranking: 5
Net worth: $32 billion (about Dh117.5 billion)
Lakshmi N. Mittal joined the steel business set up by his father in the 1950s. An ambitious visionary, he opened a state-of-the-art mill in Indonesia in 1976 when the Indian government started restricting domestic steel production.
In 1989 he took over Iscott, a government-founded steel firm in Trinidad and Tobago, which was losing more than $100,000 a day, and turned it around within a year.
He then embarked on a decade of international expansions buying plants in Mexico, Canada, Germany, Ireland and Kazakhstan. In 1995, he transferred the firm's headquarters from Indonesia to London where he settled down.
Nine years later, he was fourth on The Sunday Times rich list with an estimated fortune of £2.2 billion. Later he bought the Romanian state-owned steel plant Sidex, propelling his group, LNM, to the fourth spot in the world steel makers league.
Mukesh and Anil Ambani
Ranking: 14 and 18 respectively
Joint net worth: $38.2 billion (About Dh140.28 billion)
Mukesh and Anil Ambani are frenetically building on the legacy of their father, the late Dhirubhai Ambani. From being a gas station attendant, Dhirubhai built the largest private sector group in India.
Today Reliance provides almost 5 per cent of the central government's revenues. The group has made strident forays into the information technology sector. Reliance Telecom, an unlisted company with two operating divisions — Reliance Mobile and Reliance Basic — is Anil's pet project. Reliance Mobile has become a phenomenon in the telecom sector and Reliance has also completed its acquisition of BSES and renamed it Reliance Power.
Azim Premji
ranking: 21
Net worth: $17.1 billion (About Dh62.7 billion)
Azim Premji has made Wipro one of the biggest technology companies in India. After his father's sudden demise, Premji quit his engineering degree at Stanford to take over the family's edible oil business. He was only 21 then.
Taking over the reins of Wipro he transformed the company into an Indian technology giant with interests in software services, medical systems and consumer products. Premji is today an icon for emerging India.
He has been on the Forbes' billionaires list for a few years and has now been ranked 58th for his 74 per cent holding in Wipro. His fortune has been estimated at $6.7 billion (about Dh24.6 billion).
Sunil Bharti Mittal
Ranking: 69
Net worth: $9.5 (about Dh34.8 billion)
Sunil Mittal is a first generation entrepreneur billionaire. After graduating from Punjab University, he started a tiny bicycle business in the 1970s. The company, Bharti Enterprises, is today one of India's biggest telecom service providers.
The turning point in Mittal's life was in 1992 when the cellular licence for the Delhi metro circle was being given out to the private sector. He partnered with French telecom company Vivendi to win the licence, and has not looked back.
Today Bharti offers cellular services, basic telephony, and is laying optic fibre cable across 200 cities. Bharti is also putting together a $650 million undersea cable project along with its partner Singapore Telecom connecting Chennai with Singapore. Mittal dreams of making Bharti one of the top two telecom players in India. Not difficult for him considering his meteoric rags to riches rise.
Kumaramangalam Birla
Ranking: 86
Net worth: $8 billion (about Dh30 billion)
Kumaramangalam Birla is the Chairman of the $24 billion (about Dh88.13 billion) Aditya Birla Group. He took over the reins of the business at 27 after his father's death and steered it to new heights. The group entered high-potential sectors such as software, insurance and branded apparel.
A sobre, humble and low profile industrialist, his great passion is in collecting exquisite works of art.
Pallonji Mistry
Ranking: 137
Net worth: $5.6 billion (about Dh20.56 billion)
The reclusive Pallonji Mistry has a crucial stake in Tata Sons, the holding company of the Rs440 billion Tata Group, making him the single largest individual shareholder. His holding is six times that of group Chairman Ratan Tata and his family.
The Mistrys have a huge construction company, Shapoorji Pallonji. Shapoorji, the group patriarch and Pallonji's father, built some of Mumbai's landmarks which include the Hong Kong Bank, Grindlays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and Reserve Bank of India buildings in the plush Fort area.
Mistry extended the construction interests of the group to the Middle East by bidding for the Sultan of Oman's palace.
Adi Godrej
Ranking: 277
Net worth: $2 billion (about Dh7.34 billion)
Adi Godrej belongs to old money and class. He is an admirer of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, GE chief Jack Welch and Indian industrialists JRD Tata and Dhirubhai Ambani.
The Godrej group has its fingers in several pies and receives 10 per cent of its revenue from operations outside India. Godrej dreamsdream of increasing it to around 25 per cent over a 10-year period.
Shiv Nadar
Ranking: 310
Net worth: $1.8 billion (about Dh6.61 billion)
He is the brain behind the HCL group which is rated as one of the biggest companies in the Indian IT industry.
An electrical engineer from Coimbatore, he had worked with Cooper Engineering as a systems analyst and as a senior management trainee at DCM before starting HCL. As founder and key architect of the company, Nadar spearheaded strategic alliances, joint ventures and acquisitions during 1995-97, the period during which HCL grew phenomenally.
In December 1999, the company successfully completed an IPO and raised Rs8.23 billion. Apart from HCL technologies, Nadar has two other major investments: NIIT and HCL Infosystems.
Anil Agarwal
Ranking: 552
Net worth: $1 billion (about Dh3.67 billion)
Anil Agarwal of Sterlite Industries made a hostile bid for Indian Aluminium Company in 1998 but got pipped to the post by Hindalco in a vitriolic takeover battle.
In 2002, Sterlite bid for Balco successfully and turned it into a model for the government's divestment programme. Agarwal set out as a cable manufacturer and then branched into telecom.
Today, Sterlite is a near monopoly in the optic-fibre industry. He has become an integrated player in cables, copper and aluminum, all businesses integral to the fast growing telecom sector.
Growing in strength
India's dollar billionaire club is getting fatter every year thanks to a surging stock market, growing real-estate and infrastructure companies. According to Forbes the top four Indian billionaires are collectively measured at $180 billion. Together they are worth more than the top 40 Chinese billionaires.
Among the 20 self-made billionaires of Asia, Forbes lists six Indians led by Sunil B Mittal of Bharti group and Ramesh Chandra of Unitech.
Mittal is ranked third with a personal fortune worth $12.5 billion, followed by Chandra (fourth, $11.6 billion) and Tulsi Tanti of Suzlon (fifth, $10 billion).
The other Indians are Gautam Adani of the now-diversified Adani Group (10th, $6.7 billion), G.M. Rao of infrastructure major GMR Group ($6.2 billion, 13th, and Uday Kotak of Kotak financial services group (20th, $4.6 billion).
Anand Krishnan, an Indian in Malaysia, who is ranked sixth with a personal fortune of $7.4 billion, runs his country's largest mobile phone network, and also has a joint venture with the Chennai-based Sun TV group for satellite television.
Top of the list among the young inheritors is Vanisha Mittal the daughter of London-based steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.
Like her brother, Vanisha is active in her father's industrial empire, holding a seat on Mittal Steel's board after training in the business.
She unwittingly was thrown into the limelight for the $60 million (about Dh220 million) wedding her father threw for her and 1,000 of their closest friends in 2005 which also included a performance by pop star Kylie Minogue.
