Top 10 Richest People in India: Net Worth, Companies and Full List

Mukesh Ambani is the chairman of Reliance Industries and also Asia's wealthiest individual. The full top 10 richest people in India are Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Savitri Jindal and family, Lakshmi Mittal, Shiv Nadar, Cyrus Poonawalla, Dilip Shanghvi, Kumar Mangalam Birla, Radhakishan Damani and Uday Kotak. This CourseUnbox guide ranks them using Forbes data, explains how each fortune was built, and shows why the number you see for any one person can differ from one tracker to the next. All figures are in US dollars, sourced from Forbes, and were last reviewed this September.

Top 10 richest people in India at a glance

Net worth figures reflect the latest annual Forbes World's Billionaires snapshot. Live values change every trading day, so treat the ranking as a close guide rather than a fixed scoreboard.

Who is the richest person in India?

Mukesh Ambani is the richest person in India, with a net worth of about $99.7 billion. He chairs Reliance Industries, India's most valuable listed company, whose interests run across oil refining, petrochemicals, the Jio telecom network, retail and a fast growing clean energy arm. Ambani has held the top spot on the Forbes India ranking for many years in a row, and he remains Asia's richest person. His fortune has risen over the past year, helped by gains in Reliance shares and the continued expansion of Jio, which serves more than 500 million subscribers.

He is the clear number one, but the gap behind him is where the ranking gets interesting. Second place has swung by tens of billions of dollars in a matter of weeks, which is a useful reminder that these fortunes are living numbers, not fixed titles.

The full list of the top 10 richest people in India

1. Mukesh Ambani, $99.7 billion

Company: Reliance Industries. Source of wealth: energy, telecom and retail.

Ambani studied chemical engineering at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai and briefly pursued an MBA at Stanford University before returning to help build his father's business. Under him, Reliance moved from petrochemicals into telecom with Jio and into large scale retail, and it is now investing heavily in solar power, batteries and green hydrogen. That mix of old economy cash flow and new economy growth is a big reason his wealth keeps compounding.

2. Gautam Adani, $63.8 billion

Company: Adani Group. Source of wealth: ports, power and infrastructure.

Adani is a first-generation entrepreneur who left college early and started as a commodities trader before building a conglomerate that spans ports, airports, power generation, transmission and green energy. His net worth was listed at $63.8 billion on the most recent annual Forbes snapshot, then climbed to roughly $89.2 billion within months, after the US Department of Justice moved in May to dismiss its bribery case against the group. That single swing is a clear example of why the number attached to any billionaire depends heavily on the date you check.

3. Savitri Jindal and family, $39.1 billion

Company: O.P. Jindal Group. Source of wealth: steel, power and cement.

Savitri Jindal is the richest woman in India. She stepped in to guide the O.P. Jindal Group after the death of her husband, the group's founder, and today serves as its emeritus chairman while her sons run the main businesses in steel, power and infrastructure. Her rise from a largely private family role to the third richest person in the country is one of the more striking stories on this list.

4. Lakshmi Mittal, $31.0 billion

Company: ArcelorMittal. Source of wealth: steel.

Mittal runs ArcelorMittal, the second largest steelmaker in the world, and was one of the biggest gainers among Indian billionaires over the past year. Although he is based largely in London, his Indian roots and steel empire keep him firmly on the list of the wealthiest Indians. When global steel demand strengthens, his fortune tends to move with it.

5. Shiv Nadar, $30.9 billion

Company: HCL Technologies. Source of wealth: IT services.

Nadar co-founded what became HCL Technologies and turned it into one of India's largest software and services firms. He is also among the country's most generous philanthropists through the Shiv Nadar Foundation, and he has handed the HCL chair to his daughter, Roshni Nadar Malhotra, who is herself one of the wealthiest women in the country.

6. Cyrus Poonawalla, $27.0 billion

Company: Serum Institute of India. Source of wealth: vaccines.

Poonawalla founded the Serum Institute of India, the largest vaccine maker in the world by number of doses produced. The company supplies vaccines to India and to dozens of countries, and its scale made the Poonawalla family one of the wealthiest in the country. His son Adar Poonawalla now runs the day to day business.

7. Dilip Shanghvi, $25.6 billion

Company: Sun Pharmaceutical Industries. Source of wealth: pharmaceuticals.

Shanghvi started Sun Pharmaceutical with a small line of medicines and grew it, partly through bold acquisitions, into India's most valuable drugmaker. His wealth tracks the fortunes of the wider Indian pharmaceutical sector, a major exporter of generic medicines to the United States and beyond.

8. Kumar Mangalam Birla, $21.1 billion

Company: Aditya Birla Group. Source of wealth: metals, cement and telecom.

Birla took charge of the Aditya Birla Group at a young age after the death of his father and expanded it across aluminium, cement through UltraTech, financial services and telecom. The group is one of India's oldest and most diversified business houses, and Birla is often cited as an example of an heir who grew what he inherited many times over.

9. Radhakishan Damani, $15.7 billion

Company: Avenue Supermarts (DMart). Source of wealth: retail and investing.

Damani is a famously low-profile investor who built DMart into one of India's most profitable supermarket chains by keeping prices low and costs tight. He is widely respected in Indian markets and mentored a generation of value investors, several of whom went on to become major fund managers.

10. Uday Kotak, $14.4 billion

Company: Kotak Mahindra Bank. Source of wealth: banking.

Kotak started with a single finance company and grew it into Kotak Mahindra Bank, a leading private lender, which made him Asia's richest banker. He now serves as a non-executive director of the bank he founded, and his story is a rare case of a homegrown financier reaching the very top of the wealth table.

The combined wealth of India's richest, at a glance

India produced a record 229 billionaires on the latest Forbes list, up from 205 a year earlier. The combined wealth of Indian billionaires crossed $1 trillion for the first time, rising from $941 billion. The ten richest Indians alone are worth about $368 billion, which is more than a third of that total. By billionaire count, India now ranks third in the world, behind the United States with 989 and mainland China with 539.

Put another way, the top ten names on this page control a share of national billionaire wealth that most countries spread across dozens of people. That concentration says something important about the Indian economy: a handful of large, diversified groups sit at the centre of energy, telecom, steel, retail and finance, and their founders or heirs dominate the rich list as a result.

Which industries create the most wealth in India

The fortunes on this list are not random. They cluster in a few sectors that have grown fastest as India has modernised. Diversified conglomerates lead the way, with Reliance and the Adani Group each straddling several industries at once. Steel and metals produce two of the top four, through Lakshmi Mittal and the Jindal family. Information technology gives the country Shiv Nadar, pharmaceuticals give it Cyrus Poonawalla and Dilip Shanghvi, retail gives it Radhakishan Damani, and financial services give it Uday Kotak.

The pattern is worth understanding if you are trying to work out where the next great fortunes will come from. Energy transition, digital services, healthcare and consumer retail are the engines here, and they are the same fields drawing the most investment and hiring across the country. For a student or a young professional, that overlap between where the money already is and where the jobs are growing is not a coincidence.

How is net worth calculated, and why do the figures differ?

If you check three websites, you will often see three different net worth figures for the same person. That is normal, and here is why.

A billionaire's net worth is mostly the market value of their stake in listed companies, plus an estimate of privately held assets such as unlisted businesses and real estate, minus known debts. Because share prices move every day and the rupee to dollar exchange rate shifts as well, the number changes constantly. Forbes publishes two versions: a real-time figure that updates through the trading day, and an annual snapshot fixed on a single date. Other trackers, such as the Hurun India Rich List, use their own valuation dates and methods, so their totals rarely match Forbes to the dollar.

Two more factors widen the gap. Hidden holdings, anonymous trusts and offshore assets are usually left out of published figures, so the real totals may be higher. And major news can move a fortune overnight: Gautam Adani gained tens of billions of dollars in weeks after a US legal case against his group was dropped. This is why every serious ranking, including this one, states its source and its timing rather than presenting a single number as final. When you compare two lists, always check the date first.

How the rankings have shifted recently

Rankings look stable at the very top and churn lower down. Mukesh Ambani has stayed at number one while his net worth rose from about $92.5 billion to $99.7 billion over the past year. Across the whole list, the combined wealth of Indian billionaires grew from $941 billion to more than $1 trillion, and the number of billionaires rose from 205 to 229, so the pie got bigger even as individual ranks moved around.

Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal was among the fastest climbers, lifted by stronger metal prices. Gautam Adani made the single largest jump in absolute terms once his legal cloud lifted. Lower down, retail, banking and pharmaceutical fortunes tend to trade places from year to year as their share prices swing. The lesson for a reader is simple: the names in the top five are fairly durable, but the exact order and the figures beside them are always in motion.

Richest woman in India

Savitri Jindal is the richest woman in India, with a family net worth of $39.1 billion, which also places her third overall. She leads the O.P. Jindal Group as emeritus chairman. Roshni Nadar Malhotra, who chairs HCL Technologies, is another of the wealthiest women in the country, and the number of women on the national rich list has been rising steadily, a shift worth watching in the years ahead.

What India's richest can teach learners and professionals

The ten wealthiest Indians did not follow one path, and that is the useful lesson. Mukesh Ambani trained as a chemical engineer, Uday Kotak built his fortune on finance, and Gautam Adani left college early and learned by doing. Some, like Kumar Mangalam Birla and the Jindal family, inherited a business and then professionalised and expanded it, while others, like Dilip Shanghvi and Radhakishan Damani, started small and scaled with discipline. Formal degrees, self-teaching and family mentorship all appear on this list.

For anyone studying business, finance or technology, the practical takeaway is that deep domain skill plus patient capital tends to beat quick wins. Notice how many of these fortunes were built by staying in one industry for decades and compounding, rather than by chasing every trend. If you want to understand the fields that produced this wealth, structured courses in finance, the stock market, entrepreneurship and data skills are a sensible starting point, and CourseUnbox lists options across each of these areas.