New Delhi, October 7 (IANS)| The soaring stock market, with $257 billion (a nearly 50 percent increase) in the past 12 months, has pushed the combined wealth of members of the 2021 Forbes list of India’s 100 richest to a record US$775 billion. In this bumper year, more than 80 percent of lists saw their fortunes increase, with 61 raising $1 billion or more.
Topping the list is Mukesh Ambani, the richest person in India since 2008 with a net worth of $92.7 billion. Ambani recently outlined a plan to foray into renewable energy with a 10 billion investment by his Reliance Industries. One-fifth of the growth in the collective wealth of India’s 100 richest people has come from infrastructure tycoon Gautam Adani, who is at No. 2 for the third year in a row. Adani nearly tripled its fortune to $74.8 billion from $25.2 billion earlier, with shares of all its listed companies rising sharply.
Shiv Nadar, founder of software giant HCL Technologies, comes third with $31 billion, adding $10.6 billion to his wealth from the country’s booming tech sector. Retailing magnate Radhakishan Damani retained the fourth spot, nearly doubling his net worth from $15.4 billion to $29.4 billion, as his supermarket chain Avenue Supermarts opened 22 new stores in the fiscal year ending March.
India has so far administered over 870 million COVID-19 vaccine shots, partly thanks to the Serum Institute of India, founded by vaccine billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, with a net worth of $19 billion. enters the top five with His privately held company manufactures Covishield under license from AstraZeneca and has other COVID-19 vaccines under development. India’s recovery from the deadly second wave of COVID-19 that began earlier this year has restored investor confidence in the world’s sixth-largest economy.
Six new names have appeared in this year’s list, half of which are from the fast-growing chemicals sector. These include Ashok Bub (Number 93, $2.3 billion), whose Clean Science and Technology listed in July. Deepak Mehta (Number 97, $2.05 billion) of Deepak Nitrite and Yogesh Kothari (Number 100, $1.94 billion) of Alkyl Amine Chemicals. Arvind Lal (Number 87, $2.55 billion), executive chairman of diagnostics chain Dr Lal PathLabs, also debuted on the list after a pandemic-induced boom in testing caused his company’s shares to double over the past year.
Property veteran and politician Mangal Prabhat Lodha (Number 42, $4.5 billion) returned to the ranks after the country’s IPO rush spurred its April listing of macrotech developers. Among the four other returnees is Pratap Reddy (Number 88, $2.53 billion), whose listed hospital chain Apollo Hospitals Enterprise is testing and treating COVID-19 patients.