Mumbai, the city with the largest number of slums in Asia, is also the city with the most billionaires and the fastest growing number of billionaires in Asia in 2023.
According to the 2024 Global Rich List released by the Hurun Research Institute, Mumbai, India's financial center, surpassed the capitals of China, Japan and South Korea to become the billionaire capital of Asia for the first time. There are 92 billionaires with a fortune of more than $100 million on the list, the third largest in the world.
In terms of growth, the number of billionaires in Mumbai has increased by 26 in the past year, making it the fastest-growing city in the world for billionaires.
The Indian city of Mumbai was also the filming location for the 2008 Oscar Best Picture "Slumdog Millionaire". (Source: Screenshot of movie stills)
Often referred to as India's "Los Angeles," Mumbai is its financial, cultural, and entertainment hub. It is home to the headquarters of many Indian financial institutions such as the Reserve Bank of India, the Bombay Stock Exchange, the National Stock Exchange of India, and has the largest seaport in India, and is also the home of Bollywood in India.
As a result, Mumbai has also attracted India's top tycoons.
And the story of "Slumdog Millionaire", which won the 2008 Oscar for Best Film, takes place in Mumbai. In the movie, Jamal, a young man who grew up in the slums of Mumbai, participates in a TV quiz show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" with a big prize money, and wins a prize of 20 million rupees by misunderstanding and coincidence, and finally has a good harvest of wealth and love.
This is a Bombay wealth fairy tale described in "The Slumdog Millionaire". To this day, the film has instead derived a sense of irony and reality.
Because almost none of the Indian billionaires who have made Mumbai the billionaire capital of Asia were born in slums.
A place where the rich gather
Mumbai's most famous billionaire is undoubtedly Ambani, the richest man in Asia, India's telecom tycoon, and chairman of Reliance Industries. According to the statistics of Hurun Wealth List, its wealth reached 830 billion yuan, ranking tenth in the world.
(Ambani, Asia's richest man.) Source: Social Media)
Ambani often talks through the media about how he changed his destiny from a poor family through knowledge, and continued to work hard to become a successful entrepreneur. But in fact, Ambani's father was a successful businessman, he started out in the spice and textile trade, and had the foresight to enter the petrochemical industry in the 80s of the 20th century, establishing the Reliance Industries Group.
In 1981, at the age of 23, Ambani was ordered by his father to drop out of Stanford University and return to Mumbai to take over the family business. In 2016, Ambani was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering for his "engineering and business leadership in refineries, petrochemicals, and related industries."
Today, Reliance Industries is a huge integrated business empire, with businesses covering petroleum, chemical, textile, retail, communications, media and many other fields. With one of the world's largest oil refineries, the group's communications subsidiary, Jio, has disrupted India's communications market with a low-price strategy, with more than 3,000 retail stores across the country, as well as operating several television stations and one of the country's top international schools.
Reliance Industries' refinery (Source: Reliance Industries' official website)
Goldman Sachs, a well-known investment bank on Wall Street, is also very optimistic about the growth potential of Reliance Industries, believing that the potential upside of Reliance Industries by 2026 may be as high as 54%, which means that Ambani's wealth still has huge room for growth.
The second richest man in India, also in Mumbai, is Adani, an Indian energy tycoon and chairman and founder of the Adani Group, whose wealth has reached 620 billion yuan according to the Hurun Wealth List, ranking 15th in the world.
According to Bloomberg's wealth data, Adani's fortune also briefly caught up with Ambani in January 2024.
Adani, by contrast, came from a more modest family, with his father being a textile merchant but a modest business.
Adani, India's richest man (Source: Social Media)
In 1978, Adani dropped out of the University of Gujarat, India, to work as a diamond sorter in Mumbai. But the times gave him the opportunity, and at the age of 19, Adani and his brother co-founded a plastics factory, took advantage of India's economic liberalization, began to expand the commodity trading business, bought the port rights, and finally settled in the thermal power industry.
Building on its dominant position in India's power sector, Adani Group today operates in the fields of logistics, agriculture, real estate, financial services and defence, making it India's largest private thermal power generator and India's largest private port operator.
There are no miracles in the slumsMumbai's rich know that there is no general prosperity in their city, where slums are rife.
According to the Indian government's statistics in 2022, Mumbai, with a population of more than 20 million, has 2,400 slums, and about 60% of the city's population lives in slums.
The most famous of these is the Dharavi slum, with a population density of more than 277,000 people per square kilometre, much higher than Monaco, the world's most densely populated country (19,497 people per square kilometre). In this slum in India, the average person owns just over 3 square meters of space, and in many places there is no running water or electricity.
The slums of Mumbai, with their blue tarp roofs, stand out from the surrounding high-rise buildings from an aerial perspective. (Source: Social Media)
According to Oxfam, an international NGO, Dharavi's residents earn up to $10 a day, and they are not the poorest group in India. This is mainly due to Dharavi's location in the heart of Mumbai's city centre, which is full of business vibrancy, with residents working hard and creating wealth.
But the most terrible problem is that the ceiling of their efforts may be limited to mending clothes and burning clay pots for a lifetime. Children born in the slums cannot replicate the path of the rich.
Even if you don't look at the Indian "old rich" such as Ambani and Adani, just look at the Indian upstarts on the 2024 Hurun billionaires list, they all come from industries that require a large amount of capital threshold, and they need to have a certain knowledge threshold. Among them, 39 are from the pharmaceutical industry, 27 are from the automotive and auto parts industry, and 24 are from the chemical industry.
The way the rich accumulate wealth has entered another dimension, and they can even use the slums to accumulate money like crazy.
In November 2022, billionaire Adani won a bid for the Dharavi slum redevelopment project in Mumbai.
The residence of Indian billionaire Adani in Mumbai (Source: Social Media)
Once the demolition project goes smoothly and the land in the heart of Mumbai will be developed into residential and commercial properties, Adani will make a profit of US$2.4 billion at a market price of just over US$612 million.
Outside the slums, India's macroeconomic growth is high.
In January 2024, India's stock market is the world's fourth-largest stock market by market capitalization after the United States, China and Japan, and is currently valued at more than $4 trillion. India's GDP growth jumped to 8.4% in the fourth quarter of 2023, buoyed by the rapid rise of the service sector and the government's heavy investment in infrastructure.
But in the slums, there are basically no fairy tales for making money.
A street corner in Dharavi, Mumbai's largest slum (Source: Social Media)
The problem of wealth disparity is well known in India, but the Indian government has not released specific figures for many years.
A study by the World Inequality Lab, made up of economist Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century, and others found that India was the richest 1% of the population in 2023, owning 40.1% of the country's wealth. Wealth concentration is at its highest level in 60 years, with a higher share of income than countries such as Brazil and the United States, and India's wealth gap is among the widest in the world.
According to the group, "the 'billionaire rule', led by India's modern bourgeoisie, is more unequal than the country was during the period of British colonial rule, reaching the highest level since statistics began".