The billion-dollar race: How India’s richest has changed over the last 20 years

The recent Ukraine crisis impacted the markets quite bad, resulting in the rich losing a large chunk of their money.

Despite the fall, Mukesh Ambani remains the richest Indian, a position that he has been holding for years. Gautam Adani is a close second , followed by Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, Radhakrishnan Damani, Lakshmi Mittal, Cyrus Poonawalla, Uday Kotak, Dilip Shanghvi, and Savitri Jindal, chronologically.

Ambani manages to cling on to the throne of not just the richest Indian, but also the richest Asian, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.

But this is not how the list of the super-rich always looked like. To give a perspective of how things have changed over the past two decades, Here is an analysis of the Forbes’ The World’s Billionaires list from 2002 to 2021.

Class of 2002

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The list of Indian billionaires in 2002 will probably look different to one right now.

While we now have 18 Indians on the list of the 500 richest people in the world, , only five Indians were worth more than a billion dollars. The richest among them was tech titan Azim Premji, the former Chairman of Wipro, who at that time had a net worth of $6.4 billion. Premji was also the 41st richest person in the world. The only other Indian on the list of billionaires were Dhirubhai Ambani (and family), Kumar Birla, Shiv Nadar and Lakshmi Mittal.

Premji continued to be the richest Indian for two more years, until Lakshmi Mittal overtook him in 2005 to become not just the richest Indian, but to be the third richest in the world. At that time, he had a wealth of $25 billion, a growth of over 75 per cent from the previous year. It was around the same time when his Mittal Steel merged with Luxembourg-based Arcelor to become ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaking company. Mittal was also the first Indian who was part of the list of the ten richest people in the world.

The Reliance story

Mittal reigned as the richest Indian for a while, until 2008. The next year, Reliance Industries Limited’s Mukesh Ambani, with a net worth of $19.5 billion overtook him to become the richest Indian. That was Ambani’s fourth year as an independent billionaire in the list, after the death of his father and parting ways with his brother.

While Mittal did overtake him in 2011, Ambani has consistently been the richest Indian since 2011. Ambani holds close to 50 per cent of the total RIL shares. While the price of a share was ₹53.01 in 2002, today, it is worth₹2,283. The value of shares has been growing over the last two decades.

Ambani now has a net worth of close to $91.9 billion, which is equivalent to 3.5 per cent of India’s GDP.

New faces

Currently, 20 Indians are part of the world’s richest 500. Of them, Adani, the second richest Indian is relatively new , having made it to the list only in 2008. He dropped out of the top 500 in 2012 and in 2014, but since 2015, his wealth has been rising continuously.

Vaccine mogul Cyrus Poonawalla entered the list in 2007 and his wealth doubled between 2019 and 2020. His Serum Institute of India is the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world. Premji, Mittal, and Nadar have been consistent members of the list for decades now. While Dilip Shanghvi has been a member of the list since 2005, Kotak and Jindal made their entries in 2007. Radhakrishnan Damani,is the latest on the list, having made his appearance for the first time in 2018.

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