During Narendra Modi's term, India has been minting billionaires at
a pretty brisk pace.
Besides some of these well known names like Adani,
there's a whole lot of names and entrepreneurs that we
haven't heard of that are now in the ranks of
the ultra wealthy.
No, no, you've been looking into some of them and
what the billionaire class or the rise in the billionaire
class says about government policy?
What are you learning?
Over the last decade, India has minted more billionaires than
ever in its history,
and this is emblematic of sort of the government policies
and the growth that we've seen in the country over
the last decade.
Barring a few bumps in the road,
particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, India's growth rate has been fairly
strong.
And because of incredible amounts of spending on infrastructure,
we've seen a number of infrastructure billionaires emerge,
real estate billionaires emerge, you know?
Some of these billionaires, you know,
Bloomberg's estimated their wealth around the time that the Modi
government came into power was around billion dollars,
or less than a billion dollars.
Today they've crossed 6, seven,
$8 billion. Some of these real estate moguls,
you know, would have had less than 10 million square
feet of property under their belt in 2014.
Fifteen today they're well above 40 to 50 million square
feet because of government spending across infrastructure,
because of reforms and land acquisition.
Real estate, we've seen many of these billionaires leverage those
policies and also benefit from these policies.
So just as the Indian government's spending on infrastructure,
for instance, has gone from about ₹1.6 trillion in 2014
to about 11 trillion as of the last budget earlier
this year,
we've seen that that money sort of trickle down to
large infrastructure players such as Larsen and Toubro and the
Adani Group,
but also smaller infrastructure players that are today billion dollar
that have billion dollar balance sheets.
Obviously, medium sized companies become large billion dollar companies.
We've seen national players become international players and similarly we've
seen this on the consumer side.
Just as the middle class has been booming.
Per capita income in India has grown considerably over the
last decade.
The more consumption that's happening,
we've seen a lot of companies,
smaller companies that were perhaps not as well known 10
years ago now become household brands and household names across
the country.
We've looked at 5 billionaires in particular who?
Really seen their wealth boom over the last decade who
may have listed or not listed their companies on the
stock exchanges.
They tend to hold these their companies very tightly with
large founder stakes.
But there are dozens and dozens of Indian billionaires that
are not as well known as some of the bigger
names,
and we've just looked at five of them on Bloomberg
this morning.