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Forbes Richest List has more Indian billionaires in India than the US

Ela Dutt
India Abroad Correspondent in New York

The Forbes Richest People in the world show some of the wear and tear the downturn in the information technology sector and the Wall Street's rocky ride has wrought on the wealthiest people.

This time, India's richest dwindled in number and Indian-Americans remained virtually the same except for a predictable unseating of IT pioneer Gururaj Deshpande and the appearance of the venture capital world's blue-eyed boy Vinod Khosla.

While it has been a rough ride for the richest, most of the richest of the rich "managed to hang in there," Forbes said.

This is the first time in the last 15 years that Forbes has done a comprehensive list covering everyone worth at least $1 billion. Predictably, several like Navin Jain of Info Space have not appeared on the list, though he was listed in the Under-40 category by the magazine last year.

Bill Gates remained on top of the list for the 7th time. In these 7 years he has increased his billions by a factor of five, reaching $58 billion.

The collective worth of the 538 billionaires in the list is $1.7 trillion.

India's leading light Wipro founder Azim Premji, whom Forbes calls the "software magnate with global ambitions," has done well despite an 84 per cent drop in Wipro's market cap since its high in February 2000 and the slowdown in the US, Wipro's largest market.

Premji owns 84 per cent of the company founded by his father in 1945 to make cooking oil. A self-confessed workaholic and recluse, Premji's family ranked the highest among Indians from any country, coming 42nd with a value of $6.2 billion.

He is followed by Dhirubhai Ambani, "an ambitious visionary," who founded the company and owns 40 per cent of petrochemicals giant Reliance Industries, whose recent market cap of $8.4 billion classifies it as one of India's most valuable companies.

He is now venturing into the $5.3-billion IT sector in India. He is ranked 124th and is worth $3.4 billion.

The "self -made infotech pioneer" Shiv Nadar's HCL group, a garage start-up 25 years ago and India's biggest PC maker today, came in 202nd at $2.2 billion and youthful Kumar Mangalam Birla 292nd with $1.7 billion.

Birla has joint ventures with AT&T in telecom and Sun Life of Canada in financial services.

There were several more on the list last year from India including Subhash Chandra, Vinay Rai, B Ramalinga Raju and the Hinduja family.

Indian-Americans, who have generally fared well over the last 2 years on this list, had a poor showing this year with just Sanjiv Sidhu of i2 Technologies, valued at $3.7 billion, ranked 109th. His company is beset with shareholder lawsuits and has been blamed by Nike for lower sales due to glitches in i2 software. Sidhu has dumped approximately $ 400 million worth of his stock this year.

Lakshmi Mittal at $1.8 billion, ranked 272nd, owns the world's fourth-largest steel group.

The famed venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, slipped and stood 490th in the list with many others. He was valued at $1 billion. The co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Forbes calls Khosla "one of the movers and shakers of the tech world."

Gururaj Desh Deshpande of Sycamore Networks fell off the list. Last year he was valued at $3.9 billion in Forbes 2000 list of richest people.

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