Top 10 Richest People in India 2026

Dilip Shanghvi founded Sun Pharmaceuticals in 1983 with a small loan from his father — a start so modest it's almost hard to square with the roughly $29 billion Forbes credited him with as of mid-2025. He has stayed almost entirely out of the public eye since, rarely giving interviews or making public appearances, which makes him something of an anomaly among India's billionaire class: enormous wealth, near-zero public profile — a reputation captured in the title of his biography, The Reluctant Billionaire. Sun Pharma has grown into one of the country's largest pharmaceutical companies in the decades since, built quietly rather than loudly.

Savitri Jindal took charge of the O.P. Jindal Group after her husband's death in a 2005 helicopter crash — not as a caretaker, but as the matriarch overseeing a conglomerate whose businesses, spanning steel, power, mining, and oil and gas, are today run across separate divisions led by her four sons. She also won a seat in the Haryana Legislative Assembly that same year, representing Hisar, making her one of the rare billionaires with a real political mandate alongside the boardroom one. Forbes estimates the Jindal family's net worth at around $40 billion as of late 2025.

Kumar Birla inherited the Aditya Birla Group at 28, after his father's sudden death in 1995, and had to prove himself fast. The group now spans some 40 countries with well over 100,000 employees, in businesses as different as cement, metals, fashion retail — Madura Fashion & Lifestyle and Pantaloons are both his — and financial services, with group revenue that has grown from roughly $2 billion in 1995 to about $70 billion today. Vodafone Idea, the telecom joint venture he helped build, has spent years losing subscribers to Jio and Airtel; Birla stepped down as its non-executive chairman in 2021, though the Aditya Birla Group keeps its stake. Net worth: roughly $24 billion, per Forbes, as of mid-2026.

Radhakishan Damani opened his first DMart store in the Mumbai suburb of Powai in 2002, after a long stint as a stockbroker and investor on Dalal Street — an unusual path into retail, and it shows in how the business runs. DMart doesn't chase flash; it owns rather than rents its stores, keeps margins thin, and has become one of India's most profitable supermarket chains, now with several hundred outlets nationwide. Damani himself remains one of India's sharper public-market investors on the side. Forbes puts his net worth at roughly $15 billion as of September 2026.

Cyrus Poonawalla founded the Serum Institute of India in 1966 and turned it into the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, producing around 1.5 billion doses a year out of its Pune headquarters. The institute became globally known during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it manufactured hundreds of millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine under the brand Covishield for India and dozens of other countries. Forbes estimates his family's net worth at roughly $22 billion as of late 2024; his son Adar now handles day-to-day operations as CEO while Cyrus remains chairman.

He has directed over $21 billion in Wipro stock to the Azim Premji Foundation — among the largest individual philanthropic pledges in Indian history — funding teacher training and education programs across India. He stepped down as Wipro's executive chairman in 2019, handing over to his son Rishad Premji.

Founder and Chairman of Bharti Airtel, Sunil Mittal launched Airtel in 1995 when India had fewer than 300,000 telephone lines and grew it into a pan-African and Indian telecom giant with roughly 650 million subscribers across 18 countries. Airtel Africa listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2019, making it one of India's most internationally diversified corporations. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government in 2007 for contributions to Indian business. Forbes places his net worth in the tens of billions of dollars.