MUMBAI, INDIA NEWS STORIES: - The time has come for Indians to become richest people in the world. The roaring Mumbai stock market, with a benchmark index up 53% in the past year, and a strong rupee that appreciated 12%, for the first time, all India rich-listers are billionaires. In aggregate, their wealth surged to $351 billion, a bit more than double last year's $170 billion, making India's 40 by far the wealthiest such group in all of Asia. The four richest Indians are worth an astonishing $180 billion. Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, who lives in London, is No. 1 again, worth $51 billion, but Mukesh Ambani, whose Reliance Industries is India's most valuable company, is quickly closing the gap. His net worth jumped $30.5 billion to $49 billion, making him the year's biggest gainer. His estranged brother Anil is close on his heels, up $30.2 billion to $45 billion. Kushal Pal Singh, worth $35 billion after the listing of his flagship DLF, is now the world's richest real estate developer. Had these four been worth as much in March, when we published our annual list of the world's billionaires, they all would have ranked among the world's 10 richest--three would have been new to the top 10; Mittal was already ranked fifth. Together, the foursome is worth more than the 40 richest Chinese combined.
The other twenty-nine of the people who returned to the list are richer than they were last year. The only exception is Rahul Bajaj, who is battling his younger sibling over dividing their empire, and whose fortune was flat at $2.3 billion or so. Then there are 10 newcomers who made the cut, including Guatam Adani, who built Mundra Port on India's west coast; Anand Jain, Mukesh Ambani's school buddy; and Gautum Thapar, whose Ballarpur Industries is India's largest paper maker. The red-hot real estate sector churned out a couple more billionaires as well: Niranjan Hiranandani, a surgeon's son, who built a thriving township in suburban Mumbai, along with his brother; and Rakesh Wadhawan, whose July listing of his company Housing Development & Infrastructure made him a billionaire. The net worth of $1.6 billion was the minimum needed to make the list, against the figure of $790 million last year. That meant folks like long time member Naresh Goyal, the founder of Jet Airways, dropped off our list, despite his fortune rising 55% to $1.55 billion. Thirteen other billionaire fortunes missed the cut. They include Nandan Nilekani and Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, co-founders of software services giant Infosys Technologies and self-made billionaire Jignesh Shah, who built India's largest commodities exchange. Also among this group of just-misses were five newly minted billionaires, including pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Murali K. Divi and India's bullish investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala.
