Billionaires alone won’t turn Modi’s India into a rich country
In March, a quiet coastal town in the western Indian state of Gujarat could have given both Davos and Coachella a run for their money.
That’s when billionaires and movie stars from around the world jetted to Jamnagar, overwhelming its small airport with private planes and chartered flights. They were all there to party with Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.
The 67-year old chairman of India’s most valuable private company Reliance Industries had thrown a lavish pre-wedding bash for his son, welcoming around
1200 guests from Silicon Valley, Bollywood and beyond.
Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump were among the many high-profile celebrities in attendance.
The three-day celebration, which saw performances by popstar Rihanna and magician David Blaine, transfixed India and further underscored Ambani’s growing global clout.
But Ambani was not the only Indian businessman at the bash whose staggering influence and riches are reshaping the world’s most populous country.
Fellow billionaire Gautam Adani, founder of the Adani group, was also invited. The infrastructure tycoon has stunned the world with his supercharged rise in the last decade. In 2022, he briefly ousted Jeff Bezos as the world’s secondwealthiest person.
“They are phenomenal … entrepreneurs, who have been able to sustain steady growth and development in a vibrant yet sometimes chaotic political and business
environment that exists in India,” said Rohit Lamba, an economist at Pennsylvania State University. Investors have been cheering the duo’s ability to adroitly bet on sectors prioritised for development by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, currently campaigning for his third consecutive term to lead India.
The South Asian country is poised to become a 21st-century economic powerhouse, offering a real alternative to China for investors hunting for growth and manufacturers looking to reduce risks in their supply chains.
Reliance Industries and the
Adani Group are sprawling conglomerates worth over US$200 billion (FJ$455.60bn) each, with established businesses in sectors ranging from fossil fuels and clean energy to media and technology
As a result, these three men —
Modi, Ambani and Adani — are playing a fundamental role in shaping the economic superpower India will become in the coming decades.
THE NEW ROCKEFELLERS
In India’s financial capital Mumbai, the fingerprints of the two businessmen are everywhere, starting from the bustling international airport, which is operated by Adani.
Their names are plastered across the city — from the bubble lettering of the Adani Group logo propped up beside highways to high-rise apartment buildings branded with Adani Realty, to cultural institutions named after the Ambani clan.
Some spaces need no names or bright labels, but their affiliations are just as obvious.
Everyone in Mumbai knows who lives in Antilia — the personal skyscraper of Ambani and his family,
which reportedly cost US$2 billion (FJ$455.60bn) to build and boasts a spa, three helipads and a 50-seat theatre.
The 27-story building sits on a street dubbed “Billionaires’ Row,” its jutting geometric architecture looming over the neighbourhood. The kind of power and influence these Indian tycoons enjoy has been seen before in other countries experiencing periods of rapid industrialisation.
Both Ambani and Adani are often compared by journalists to John D Rockefeller, who became America’s first billionaire during the Gilded Age, a 30-year period in the last decades of the 19th century.
During those decades, industrialists saw their fortunes ascend to staggering heights thanks to the rapid expansion of trains, factories and urban centres across America. Other famous names including Frick, Astor, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt also shaped the country’s infrastructure.
More recently in Asia, “chaebols” or giant family-run conglomerates have dominated the South Korean economy for decades and many of them, including Samsung and Hyundai, have become global leaders in semiconductors and autos. “India is in the middle of something that America and lots of other countries have already gone through. Britain in the 1820s, South Korea in the 1960s and 70s, and you could argue China in the 2000s,” said James Crabtree, the author of The Billionaire Raj, a book about India’s wealthy.
It is “normal” for developing nations to go through such a period of rapid growth, which sees “income accumulation at the very top, rising inequality and lots of crony capitalism,” he added.
The Indian economy has many of those characteristics.
Worth US$3.7 trillion (FJ$8.43tr) in 2023, it is the world’s fifth largest economy, jumping four spots in the rankings during Modi’s decade in office and leapfrogging the United Kingdom.