Fitoor hota hai har umr me juda juda, (Obsession comes in every age, distinct and new)

Khilone, Mashooqa, Rutba aur Khuda. (Toys, then lover, then status, then God).

THIS IS A COUPLET Hari Mohan Bangur recites when I ask him if he is getting into spirituality, given that just a day before meeting Fortune India he had met Swami Govind Dev Giri Ji Maharaj, a revered spiritual leader. “It (spirituality) is not yet a big part, but I am slowly getting into it,” says the 74-year-old founder of Shree Cement, the country’s fourth-largest cement player by market cap. Ranked 41st on this year’s Fortune India’s Top 100 Billionaires list, Bangur is worth ₹59,500 crore ($6.25 billion).

“Wealth at the end of the day is all about status and vanity. But you don’t create wealth chasing profits, you create wealth by chasing excellence,” says Bangur, sitting in a cozy meeting room at Taj Bengal, one of IHCL’s prominent properties that blends old world charm and modernity.

Articulating the philosophy on which he built Shree Cement, valued at over ₹87,000 crore ($9 billion), Bangur traces how the source of wealth in India has continually shifted across generations. He mentions that in the early years, land and agricultural produce were the primary forms of wealth, until industries built around crops such as sugar, cotton, and jute produced factory owners “far wealthier than the landowners themselves”. That cycle repeated as resource-based industries such as steel, cement, aluminium, copper took over, making the earlier farm-produce wealth “comparatively minor”.

That churn, Bangur believes, is only accelerating. “Industries such as cement aren’t going away, but new-generation sectors such as services and technology are generating billions in a fraction of time, compressing what once took 50 years into just five, with emerging fields such as semiconductors poised to be next.”

Most billionaires on the list are past 60, the threshold that legally defines a senior citizen in India. But as the saying goes, age is just a number; across the list, even as the billionaires’ sons and daughters are taking active roles in businesses, the fathers continue to show the same zeal and enthusiasm about making the most of India’s growth story, which has fuelled the country’s rise on the global mcap table to 6th at over $4.15 trillion.

STAYING WEALTHY AMID THE STORM

Not surprising that India’s wealth factory has been humming along quite nicely despite a year of extreme geopolitical turmoil and macro headwinds. Since 2020, the economy has been punctuated by one crisis after the other: beginning with Covid, followed by the Ukraine-Russia war, the energy shock, the U.S. tariff curbs and now the Israel-U.S. vs Iran conflict.

Yet, it’s worth noting that the cumulative wealth in rupee terms of the Top 100 Billionaires hit ₹90.98 lakh crore, a gain of ₹3.96 lakh crore over the past year. Interestingly, the cumulative wealth — accounting for 26.27% of India’s GDP of ₹346.36 lakh crore — has stayed higher despite the meltdown on the Street, with the benchmark Sensex falling 6% over the past one year.

The only blemish is, however, in dollar terms.

The aggregate value of the Top 100 has fallen $59 billion to $956 billion, pulling down the cumulative value below $1 trillion for the first time after two consecutive years — $1.04 trillion (2024) and $1.01 trillion (2025) — on the back of a massive 9.93% decline in the value of the rupee against the greenback. This is the worst-ever yearly decline seen while computing the wealth of the billionaires since 2022 as the rupee fell to 95.21 (August 7) versus its value of 85.76 seen the year before.

What’s pertinent to note is that in terms of sectors, diversified business houses (20) with a presence in more than two businesses continued to top the list, followed by pharmaceuticals (20), making up for ₹36.18 lakh crore and ₹14.74 lakh crore, respectively. Billionaires from the FMCG, IT, and real estate made for the remaining three sectors in the Top 5.

WHO GAINED, WHO LOST…

For the second year running, Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries) tops the list but the numbers tell a quieter story. His fortune slipped 8.64% to ₹8,67,624 crore ($91.12 billion). Gautam Adani, at rank 2, was much the same: down 6.47% to ₹8,52,104 crore ($89.49 billion). That both of India’s largest businesses contracted in the same year is itself the headline.

What makes the picture more interesting is who closed the gap. Savitri Devi Jindal & family delivered the sharpest move anywhere near the top, climbing two places to rank 3 as JSW Steel powered a 36.25% surge — ₹1,04,511 crore added in a single year. In fact, Jindal is the only family in the list to have gained over ₹1 lakh crore during the year, followed by Sudhir Mehta and Samir Mehta at ₹61,745 crore and Cyrus Poonawalla at ₹60,875 crore. Interestingly, barring Jindal, the Mehtas and Poonawalla, none of the gainers have been able to break the ₹50,000-crore mark. Dilip Shanghvi, the fourth-largest gainer in the list, added only ₹36,630 crore to his value during the year.

Below the Top 3, the Top 10 splits cleanly into winners and losers by sector. The Mistry family held steady at rank 4, largely unmoved (up a token 0.82%), but Sunil Mittal & family at rank 5 gave up ₹31,313 crore, down 9.93%. Roshni Nadar Malhotra went from rank 6 to 7 on a steep 21.90% decline, a reminder of how volatile IT-linked wealth has become.

Pharmaceuticals tell the opposite story. Dilip Shanghvi & family rose two places to rank 6, up 16.73%, while Cyrus Poonawalla posted the standout percentage gain of the entire bracket — up 38.56%, jumping four spots to rank 8 as the billionaire’s pharma and finance fortunes surged. Among the rest, Kumar Mangalam Birla (rank 9, unchanged) and Azim Premji (rank 10) held their ground.

Put together, the Top 10 this year is not a story of everyone rising with the tide. It’s a story of rotation: IT and telecom fortunes under pressure, steel and pharma pulling ahead, and the gap between rank 1 and rank 3 narrowing for the first time in years.

Topping the list of billionaires who lost wealth is Mukesh Ambani, giving up ₹82,064 crore, followed by Roshni Nadar Malhotra at ₹62,521 crore. Gautam Adani shed ₹58,954 crore, while Kushal Pal Singh posted the steepest percentage drop of the group, down 22.99% (₹35,313 crore), and Sunil Mittal & family lost ₹31,313 crore. Radhakishan Damani rounds out the largest rupee losses at ₹28,008 crore.

A broad middle band of names — Abhishek Lodha, Hari Mohan Bangur, Uday Kotak, Anil Rai Gupta, the Ashwin Dani family, Rahul Bhatia, Hitesh Chimanlal Doshi, Arun Bharat Ram, Ravi Kant Jaipuria, the Kamath brothers, and the Dhingra family — each gave up somewhere in the ₹5,000-12,000 crore range.

It’s a mixed group by sector — real estate, aviation, chemicals, fintech — suggesting this wasn’t one industry’s bad year, but several unrelated headwinds landing at once.

Further down, a long tail of smaller but still meaningful declines rounds out the list: names such as Sunil Vachani, the Bajaj family, Lachhman Das Mittal, Nusli Wadia, Vikas Oberoi, the Santhanam family, B. Partha Saradhi Reddy, G.V. Prasad & Satish Reddy, Jamshyd Godrej, the Razack family, Hasmukh Chudgar, Yusuf Hamied, and Surender Saluja — each losing anywhere from a few hundreds to under ₹5,000 crore.

The decline is a reminder that even in a market where most billionaires keep compounding upward, a meaningful cluster moved south, across sectors that have little in common except a hard year.

…AND WHO JOINED THE 100

But even in a challenging year, there are 13 names that broke into the Top 100 for the first time, making their mark within the 61st to 100th rank, an indication that even as familiar names dominate the top, there is a churn at the bottom quartile.

Leading this year’s debutant class are Nandlal Rungta & Mukund Rungta, with interests in metals and mining — Rungta Sons and Rungta Mines — at rank 61 with ₹40,951 crore, the largest fortune among newcomers. Close behind is Kushal Narendra Desai & Chaitanya Narendra Desai, promoters of electrical equipment maker Apar Industries, at ₹38,510 crore. Not far below them, Santiago Martin enters via Future Gaming & Hotel Services, one of the country’s dominant lottery and gaming operators, at ₹36,468 crore, while Mukesh Gupta & Rajesh Gupta of Lloyds Metals & Energy round out this upper band at ₹35,567 crore.

The others in the list are Aditya Khemka & family of Aditya Infotech (₹32,644 crore), Joy Alukkas of Joyalukkas, virtually tied at ₹32,544 crore, and Chandru Raheja, whose portfolio of Mindspace Business Parks, Shoppers Stop, and Chalet Hotels values him at ₹28,869 crore.

One key takeaway of this year’s debutants is that pharmaceuticals had a strong year, accounting for four of the 13 entrants. The bulk of the newcomers have clustered within ₹28,000-33,000 crore, a band where pharma billionaires stand out. Ajay Piramal (Piramal Finance and Piramal Pharma) leads this group at ₹31,792 crore, followed by Glenn Saldanha & family (Glenmark Pharma) at ₹30,108 crore, and Satish Mehta & Sunil Mehta of Emcure Pharmaceuticals (₹29,187 crore), with M. Satyanarayana Reddy of MSN Laboratories (₹26,215 crore) further down.

While the wealth-creation cycle is playing in ways across sectors, there is no denying that the heart of India’s economy is beating well, and there is an opportunity to build wealth for those looking at the right places.

WHERE THE GROWTH IS...

Just as Bangur spoke of identifying new engines of wealth creation, there are some billionaires who are already looking at investing in trends beyond their core businesses.

Catamaran Ventures, the investment vehicle of the Narayana Murthy family (ranked 93rd), is a perfect example of where the next cycle of opportunity may be in the offing.

Deepak Padaki, who steers the fund’s strategy, describes a deliberate pivot away from the tech and tech-enabled services that once dominated Catamaran’s portfolio. “About three years ago, we came out with a hypothesis on what we can do in manufacturing over the next 10 years, for job creation in India, indigenisation and exports.”

That’s not surprising considering that the manufacturing sector now contributes about 17% of India’s GDP and has been compounding growth of manufacturing GVA at 10.88% between FY23 and FY26.

What distinguishes Catamaran’s approach is where it chooses to play within manufacturing. “There’s a lot of capital flowing into the assembly of phones and laptops and things like that, but what we are keen on is the component side, but combined with global competitiveness: aerospace, electronics, medical devices, electric vehicle components,” explains Padaki.

The scale of the pivot is itself telling with manufacturing making up for a quarter of the fund’s holdings. “About 25% of our portfolio is in manufacturing,” Padaki says, adding starkly of where it stood two years prior: “It would have been almost zero.”

The reallocation is not risk-diversification but conviction-led. “In investing, when you believe in a theme, we don’t look at it from a portfolio-construction basis, we put the money where we believe the future lies,” says Padaki.

That same conviction is shaping how single-family offices across India are positioning themselves for the next decade, strengthening their portfolios with long-term bets on tech firms.

In other words, wealth creation is more of an art than science and as Bangur frames it: “If you’re not actively creating a new source of wealth yourself, you’re essentially living off what’s handed down... real growth requires building something new.”

Fortune, it seems, favours the reinvented — much like obsession always has.