India added 55 new billionaires during pandemic-stricken 2020, with an average of one per week, while Mumbai maintained its position as home to the richest with 61 of them living in the city.
Indian-origin billionaires
The country is now home to 177 dollar-billionaires, up from 137 a year ago, while the total number of Indian-origin billionaires stood at 209. Mumbai is followed by New Delhi (40) and Bengaluru (22), according to the Hurun Global Rich List 2021.
There were 32 billionaires of Indian origin living outside of India, including steel magnate LN Mittal, who stays in London. Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani is the richest Indian and the eighth richest man in the world with a networth of ₹6.06-lakh crore ($83 billion). However, Zhong Shanshan, Chairman of Chinese bottled-water company Nongfu Spring, is Asia’s richest man with a wealth of $85 billion.
With a networth of ₹34,800 crore, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairperson and Managing Director of Bengaluru-based Biocon, is the richest Indian woman.
“Indian wealth creation is dominated by cyclical and traditional industries, compared to tech-driven wealth creation in the US and China. When the tech driven wealth creation reaches full potential, India could potentially beat the US in terms of the number of billionaires,” said Hurun India Managing Director and Chief Researcher Anas Rahman Junaid.
Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani, with a networth of ₹2.34-lakh crore, was ranked the second richest Indian (global ranking 48), followed by HCL Technologies Chairman Shiv Nadar (global ranking 58) with a wealth of ₹1.94-lakh crore. Promoters of eight healthcare companies, each from Mumbai and Hyderabad, including Lupin Healthcare and MSN Laboratories, seven from Ahmedabad and five from Delhi, also found their place in the rich list. They included Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, Pankaj Patel of Cadila Healthcare, Manju D Gupta of Lupin and PV Ramprasad Reddy of Aurobindo Pharma.
ArcelorMittal Chairman and CEO, Lakshmi N Mittal, with a networth of ₹1.40-lakh crore (global ranking 104), was ranked fourth. With a networth of $197 billion, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet, while Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos came in second ($189 billion), followed by Louis Vuitton SE group head Bernard Arnault ($114 billion). “Despite the disruption caused by Covid-19, this year has seen the biggest wealth increase of the last decade. A stock-markets boom, driven partly by quantitative easing and flurry of new listings have minted eight new dollar billionaires a week for the past year. The world has never seen this much wealth created in just one year, much more than perhaps could have been expected for a year so badly disrupted by Covid-19,” said Hurun Report Chairman and Chief Researcher Rupert Hoogewerf.
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