Sunil Mittal's Airtel succession play

Bharti Airtel Ltd. Chairman Sunil Mittal, a sprightly 68, told investors recently that he still has “some years left”. That sounds like an understatement given his ambitious attempt to redefine succession planning in the country by keeping his children away from the business he built, even as he plans their eventual entry.

The next generation of Mittals, including his sons Shravin and Kavin, and daughter Eiesha, are building their own track records outside Airtel, with their own businesses and their own consequences, including failures. Eventually, Mittal implies, they will earn their way back to the table. He called it a “unique experiment”. It is certainly unusual in the context of how Indian promoter families have traditionally handled succession.

The old playbook is well-worn. The chosen heir is inducted in their late twenties, given a division and a title. They are insulated from serious failure by the parent company’s balance sheet and reputation. Their mistakes are absorbed quietly while their wins are amplified. The result is that when the founder steps back, power transfers along bloodlines that have never been stress-tested.

Kavin Mittal is the clearest case study of how his father is attempting to change that narrative. He founded Hike, a messaging app that once reached unicorn status and briefly looked like India’s answer to WhatsApp. When the model failed to scale, Hike pivoted to real-money gaming through its platform Rush. That business grew quickly but was ultimately rendered unviable by regulatory changes, and last year Mittal shut the company down after a 13-year run. In a traditional Indian promoter family, that would never have been allowed to happen.

The son of Sunil Mittal would have been insulated from the consequences of his decisions. Instead, Kavin went out, built something real, ran it for years, and watched it fail. He now knows things about business that no Airtel boardroom could have taught him.

There are faint echoes of this approach elsewhere in Indian business. Ananya Birla, the daughter of Kumar Mangalam Birla, has built Svatantra Microfin outside of the Aditya Birla Group, running it as an independent microfinance business in a tough regulatory environment. But even this comparison has limits, since the Birla name opens doors in ways that are invisible but real.

Mittal’s children have ventured into London-based venture investing and consumer technology, where the Bharti name has little legacy pull and provides no invisible advantages.

What Mittal is doing has a clear Western analogue in the dynastic family office model, where heirs are expected to build independent credentials before returning to steward the family legacy. The Rothschilds operated this way for generations. The Pritzker family, owners of Hyatt Hotels, took it furthest with heirs actively encouraged to pursue careers in politics, law, and independent investment, returning with external credibility. The common thread is a belief that qualities like judgment, resilience and an understanding of failure that are needed to steward a large family enterprise cannot be taught inside the enterprise itself.

Sunil Mittal appears to have arrived at the same conclusion in an Indian context where this logic is far from obvious.

The succession question is not academic. Airtel is competing in one of the most capital-intensive sectors in the world against Reliance Jio, backed by the full force of India’s largest conglomerate. It is simultaneously trying to raise average revenue per user to ₹350, expand into data centres, and, lately, build a lending business—all challenges in which the margin for leadership error is thin.

Significantly, Sunil Mittal explicitly named Gopal Vittal as both professional anchor and mentor to the next generation. If and when Mittal family members eventually step into formal roles, they will not walk in cold nor will they walk in as untested inheritors.

That said, there are real risks in the model. Children who build independent businesses long enough develop their own identities, ambitions, and institutional loyalties. Reintegrating them with the Airtel parent, without creating strategic confusion or deepening the conglomerate discount that analysts already flag, could prove a real governance challenge. There is also a timing question: if Mittal remains in place for another decade, his children will be in their late forties before taking on significant roles.

Notwithstanding the questions surrounding it, if Mittal’s experiment works, it could prompt other Indian promoter families to follow suit. Indian capitalism has long debated professional management but perhaps the next debate will be about how to raise professional heirs.

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.