Mukesh Ambani tops LN Mittal in Forbes' India rich list

There was no surprise in the battle for the top spot in the recently released Forbes India Rich List. Reliance Industries' Chairman Mukesh Ambani has topped the list yet again with a net worth of USD 32 billion. But there has been a tussle for the other ranks on the list.

Steel baron and Chairman and CEO of ArcelorMittal, Lakshmi Mittal and Anil Ambani, Chairman of ADAG completed the top three with net worth of USD 30 billion and USD 17.5 billion respectively. The number of Indian billionaires this year has almost doubled to 52 this year in Forbes' India Rich List. The net worth of the top 10 has gone up from USD 97 billion to USD 155 billion, a jump of 60%.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Naazneen Karmali, India Editor, Forbes Asia spoke about the new list.

Here is a verbatim transcript of the exclusive interview with Naazneen Karmali on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: Walk us through how you guys reached the list?

A: We really had a universe of about 150 people and we picked from there. Most of the fortunes on the list are publicly traded fortunes. They are from listed companies. So that meant mining that data a bit. But the trick there is to really figure out what is the beneficial interest of the individual and their families.

For private fortunes, what we normally do is we benchmark against a listed company in the same sector and the same industry. We had a team of about half a dozen reporters scurrying about for atleast a couple of months getting all these names in place.

Q: We were going through the list as well and part of what we are headlining with is the fact that Sunil Mittal has gone from number 4 to number 8. When you guys started compiling the numbers were you surprised with what you came out with in terms of top five or is that basically what you had at the back of your mind as faces you would see in your list?

A: I would rather focus your attention on the top ten. The top ten usually remain the same and within that there is always a bit of a shuffle. The interesting thing this year in the top ten apart from the names where there is not such a huge change, the only change is that Savitri Jindal who heads the OP Jindal Group.

Sajjan (Jindal) has been in the news today for the deal with his company, but it is his mother who is the overall Chair of the group, and she has moved up into the top ten. She was ranked number 12 last year and that is really thanks to Naveen’s company which is Jindal Steel and Power and that has just taken off like a rocket.

The key thing I would like to point out is that if you look at the top ten net worth, last year they were worth about USD 97 billion. This year they have gone up to USD 155 billion. So that is really a 60% rise. Within the names, as I said not much of a change, just a bit of trading places, but otherwise pretty much what we expected.

Q: Any media moguls in your list maybe from top 15 or 20 or 30?

A: Yes, we do. We have and that is surprising because if you look at media elsewhere in the world it is really in the doghouse. But our media listers have been rather fortunate. In fact their fortunes have all increased.

In this list I would particularly like to point out Kalanithi Maran of Sun TV Network, his fortune has almost doubled. Mind you he is in a regional play but has done phenomenally well. We’ve got a big story on Kalanithi Maran. You can see it on forbes.com right now.

Mr. Subhash Chandra of Zee has also done very well for himself. So we do have a few media fortunes. We have Shobhana Bhartia of Hindustan Times and we have the Times Group because they are the market leaders. We do have some media fortunes here.