Mumbai: At a recent cricket match here, Mukesh D. Ambani sat in his private box quietly watching the team he owns, the Mumbai Indians. He seemed oblivious to the others around him: his son cheering wildly, his wife draped in diamond jewellery and a smattering of guests anxiously awaiting the briefest opportunity to speak with him.
A minor bureaucrat stood a few rows back, strategizing with aides about how to buttonhole “the Chairman,” as Ambani is sometimes called. Waiters in baggy tuxedoes took turns trying to offer him a snack, but as they drew near became too nervous to speak.
Conscience-keeper?: Ambani with daughter, Isha, at an Indian Premier League match. She has questioned Reliance’s environmental record
In the last century, Mohandas K. Gandhi was India’s most famous and powerful private citizen. Today, Ambani is widely regarded as playing that role, though in a very different way. Like Gandhi, Ambani belongs to a merchant caste known as the modh banias, is a vegetarian and a teetotaller and is a revolutionary thinker with bold ideas for what India ought to become.
Yet Gandhi was a scrawny ascetic, a champion of the village, a sceptic of modernity and a man focused on spiritual purity. Ambani is a fleshy oligarch, a champion of the city, a burier of the past and a man who deftly—and, some critics say, ruthlessly—wields financial power. He is the richest person in India, with a fortune estimated in tens of billions of dollars, and many people here expect that he will be the richest person on earth before long.
Although he lacks a politician’s silver tongue—he can be a nervous public speaker, and his diction can be halting—he talks more like a father of the nation than a corporate executive. Describing his goals, he says these are for India’s benefit as much as they are for his sprawling company, Reliance Industries Ltd.
Transformer: Ambani with his father, the late Dhirubhai Ambani
“Can we really banish abject poverty in this country?” he mused aloud in a rare interview at his headquarters here. “Yes, in 10, 15 years we can say we would have done that substantially. Can we make sure that we create a social structure where we remove untouchability? We’re fast moving to a new India where you don’t think about this caste and that caste.”
As millions of Indians graduate from burning cow dung for energy to guzzling oil, Reliance is ploughing billions of dollars into energy exploration and is building the world’s largest oil refinery. It has also opened a chain of nearly 700 stores selling food and various wares; Ambani promises that it will funnel money from the flourishing cities into the struggling agricultural heartland. He envisions Reliance, with $39 billion (Rs1.67 trillion) in revenue, as providing incomes to 12-30 million Indians within the next five years by buying from farmers and employing new workers in its stores.