The billionaires of Rajasthan

The desert breeding ground of India’s billionaires

8 September 2007

‘This is backwoods, really backwoods,’ says Aditya, as the rackety, jam-packed bus pulls into Rajgarh, a small town in the north-west of Rajasthan, India’s desert state.

‘We’re very proud of him,’ says P.S. Saini, the site engineer for the Mittal Community Centre, which the tycoon was in town to inaugurate. One of his colleagues adds: ‘He’s the richest man in UK and the richest man in India ... but also the richest man in Rajgarh.’

But what is most astounding about Shekhawati, this arid region of Rajasthan, is not that it has produced Mittal but that he is not even exceptional. This small area, where it is a struggle to produce basic foods, has an extraordinary ability to produce billionaires. For more than a hundred years the local trading class, the Marwari Seth, have shown an unerring talent for amassing riches. Four out of the top ten Indian billionaires in the Forbes rich list for 2007 were Marwari. An hour’s bumpy ride to the south-east of Rajgarh is Pilani, home of the Birla family, whose richest member Kumar Mangalam Birla ranks seventh of the ten. To the south west is Ramgarh, the home of Shashi and Ravi Ruia, whose steel, oil and shipping business ranks in eighth place. Lakshmi Mittal’s namesake Sunil Mittal, founder of the telecoms and supermarket group Bharti Enterprises, is in sixth place.

The list goes on: south of Pilani is Bagar, home of the Piramal family, who own the fourth-largest pharmaceutical company in India. In Nawalgarh to the south it’s the Poddars. Spread around other nearby towns are the home villages of the Bajaj family (who own a scooter and motorcycle empire) and the Goenkas, the Oswals, the Agarwals and the Dhoots, to name just a few. In 2000 the Indian author Gurcharan Das cited a study showing that Marwari groups owned half of India’s private industrial assets.

Indians from other communities talk about a legendary Marwari capacity for stinginess, about how commerce is taken in with their mothers’ milk. The explanations in local

legend are more colourful. Girish Sooni, a business student, tells me the story of how Narayan Baba, a monk in Pilani, blessed the Birlas to become billionaires. There’s a similar legend about Lakshmi Mittal’s father, Mohan Lal Mittal. His local Baba told him to look into a magic pot to divine his future. Inside he saw massed piles of gold and silver.