Ananya Birla’s break from billionaire bubble is a reality check for her class

Two images from the past month deserve attention. In the first, Ananya Birla, daughter of business baron Kumar Mangalam Birla, is in flood-hit upper Assam, helping deliver food, medicine and relief supplies directly to affected families. In the second, taken amid the NEET paper-leak protests that shook Delhi, she told agitating students in a recorded message that their courage had given her strength, while appealing for peaceful protest and compassionate dialogue.

Neither gesture is remarkable in itself. What’s worth noting is how unremarkable they would be for anyone outside the billionaire class, and how rare they are inside it. The more familiar image of dynastic wealth in India today is one of distance, of a life assembled in carefully curated visuals, increasingly stitched together with AI videos, in which ordinariness constitutes a threat to the exceptionalism that their surrounding media machinery has spent millions constructing.

That distance is not just bad behaviour, which frankly the billionaire class gives two hoots about. It is, potentially, bad business too.

The Aditya Birla Group makes its money from cement, aluminium, financial services and textiles—businesses that depend on customers in the small towns and villages that make up most of India, not on people who inhabit the rarified pincodes where billionaires live. A scion who has never had to stand in the midst of knee-deep waters or listen to a frightened aspirant talk about a cancelled exam is missing the very texture of the market her company depends on.

The generation of Indian entrepreneurs through the 1950s to the 1980s shared their roots with the society around them almost by default. They hadn’t yet been lifted far enough to lose the view. The next generation, judging by much of its visible behaviour, seems to have moved to another planet entirely, one from which the ground is no longer visible. Yet, we know now that lasting businesses are built by entrepreneurs deep in the trenches, not those wrapped in cotton wool.

It would be a mistake to make too much of one young scion daring to be different. But Ananya Birla isn’t alone. There are others who have shown the way.

Despite decades among India’s wealthiest business magnates, Azim Premji maintains a notoriously frugal lifestyle, famously tracking utility consumption and traveling without luxury. He has given away the vast majority of his fortune to social welfare and public education via the Azim Premji Foundation. Anand Mahindra, whose group’s fortunes are tied to tractors and utility vehicles sold mostly outside India’s big cities, turns ordinary Indians he encounters online—a delivery rider missing both arms, a teenager in Imphal who built a working prosthetic arm from scrap—into actual employees and scholarship recipients at his own companies. Ratan Tata inherited the same instinct from JRD Tata, who was known for rolling down his car window to wave back at strangers on the street. None of this makes any of them saints, and none of it is charity in the sentimental sense. It is basic civility but also prudence in a country which, at the core, is inhabited by millions of desperately poor and helpless people.

The scale of what the disconnected end of this class now controls is worth repeating. India has some 300 billionaires—the third-highest count in the world. The top 1% commands ~40.1% of total national wealth, while the bottom 50% holds barely 6%.

Popular culture has put a face to this disconnect—the tough-as-nails tycoon. From Wall Street to Succession, we have been presented strongmen for whom families, friends and employees are all expendable in the pursuit of profit. It persists because real examples keep appearing with depressing regularity.

On 29 July, employees at Visa’s Bengaluru operations, the company’s largest technology hub outside the US, began their day with a pre-dawn email informing them of some 2,600 job cuts globally, including engineers, managers and senior leaders with over two decades of service. In the aftermath, system access was pulled instantly and once-busy offices left eerily quiet. Visa is American and professionally managed. But the disconnect is the same.

A business built to serve the 99% cannot indefinitely be led by people who have never met them or spent time understanding those customers. Ananya Birla’s actions may not be sufficient proof that she could be a worthy inheritor to run the Aditya Birla Group. But they do show that, at minimum, she has not lost her moorings.

In Company Outsider, Sundeep Khanna distills more than three decades of his experience writing on India Inc. into a thousand words of context and insights that few can bring to the table. Want this newsletter delivered in your inbox? Subscribe here.