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Radhakishan Damani
Born
Retail, Mumbai. Damani, a former stock trader, opened the first DMart in Powai in 2002 and built it slowly around one discipline: own the store buildings rather than rent them, keep the range tight and price everyday groceries and household goods below rivals. Low occupancy costs let DMart stay profitable on thin margins where many Indian retail chains burned cash. It shows how a dull, patient model beat faster-growing competitors.
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Karsanbhai Patel
Household goods, Gujarat. Patel, a government chemist, began making detergent powder at home in 1969 and selling it door to door on his bicycle around Ahmedabad at a fraction of the price of Hindustan Lever's Surf. Nirma opened the washing powder market to households that had used bar soap, and forced the multinational to launch a cheaper brand of its own. Nirma later grew into soaps, chemicals and cement.
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Harsh Mariwala
Consumer goods, Mumbai. Mariwala spun Marico out of his family's Bombay Oil Industries in 1990 and turned Parachute coconut oil and Saffola cooking oil into national brands. A famous detail: he switched Parachute from tins to plastic bottles, and had to design a bottle that rats in village shops would not gnaw through. He is known for practical, consumer-first problem solving and for mentoring other founders.
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Dilip Shanghvi
Born
Pharmaceuticals, Gujarat and Mumbai. Shanghvi founded Sun Pharma in 1983 with a small loan and five psychiatric medicines made in Vapi, deliberately choosing chronic-therapy niches that bigger firms neglected. He then grew by buying struggling companies and turning them round, culminating in the purchase of Ranbaxy in 2015. Sun became India's largest drug maker without belonging to an old business house.
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Yusuf Hamied
Born
Pharmaceuticals, Mumbai. Hamied led Cipla, the generic drug maker his father founded in 1935, and in 2001 offered a triple-combination HIV treatment to Médecins Sans Frontières for about a dollar a day, a fraction of the branded price. The offer helped transform access to antiretrovirals across Africa and the developing world. Cipla's strength was cheap, high-quality manufacturing under India's process-patent rules of the time.
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Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
Born
Biotechnology, Bengaluru. Mazumdar-Shaw, a trained brewer who could not find brewing work in India as a woman, founded Biocon in a garage in 1978 to make industrial enzymes. She moved it into insulin, statins and later biosimilars, cheaper versions of biological drugs, building one of India's first serious biotech companies when banks doubted the sector. She remains executive chairperson.
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Devi Shetty
Born
Healthcare, Bengaluru. Shetty, a cardiac surgeon, founded Narayana Hrudayalaya in 2000, now Narayana Health, to bring the price of heart surgery within reach of ordinary Indian families. Its method borrows from manufacturing: high volumes, surgeons specialising in particular operations, careful purchasing and shared equipment. He also helped set up Yeshasvini, a low-premium health insurance scheme for Karnataka's farmers.
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Prathap C. Reddy
Born
Healthcare, Chennai. Reddy, a cardiologist who returned from the United States, opened the first Apollo Hospital in Chennai in 1983, India's first corporate hospital, after watching a patient die because he could not afford to travel abroad for surgery. Apollo grew into a national network of hospitals, pharmacies and clinics. His daughters now run much of the group while he remains its founder chairman.
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Uday Kotak
Born
Banking, Mumbai. Kotak started a bill-discounting business in 1985 with family money and a small office, grew it into a finance company and in 2003 won one of the few new banking licences, turning it into Kotak Mahindra Bank. He was known for caution, keeping capital high and avoiding the bad-loan cycles that hurt rivals. He stepped down as chief executive in 2023 and remains a non-executive director and large shareholder.
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Aditya Puri
Banking, Mumbai. Puri was the founding managing director of HDFC Bank from 1994 to 2020, a professional manager rather than an owner. Over 26 years he built it from a new private bank into India's most valuable lender, with a reputation for steady, low-drama growth and tight credit control. His tenure is a case study in what long, focused management can do.
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Nithin Kamath
Born
Stockbroking, Bengaluru. Kamath, a former trader, founded Zerodha in 2010 with his brother Nikhil and charged a flat low fee, then nothing on long-term share purchases, at a time when brokers took a percentage of every trade. Zerodha grew into one of India's largest brokers without raising outside capital, built its own trading software and publishes free investor education. He remains chief executive.
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Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Born
Payments, Noida. Sharma, from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, launched Paytm in 2010 as a mobile recharge service and turned it into a QR-code wallet that small shopkeepers could accept without card machines. Usage surged after the 2016 banknote withdrawal. In 2024 the central bank shut down Paytm Payments Bank's main operations, a sharp lesson in regulation. He remains chairman and chief executive of the parent company.
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Falguni Nayar
Beauty retail, Mumbai. Nayar left a senior investment banking job at Kotak at the age of 49 and founded Nykaa in 2012, selling cosmetics online at a time when Indian women had few places to find international brands or honest product guidance. Content, tutorials and authentic stock built trust, and Nykaa then added physical shops and fashion. She remains executive chairperson and chief executive.
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Sridhar Vembu
Software, Tamil Nadu. Vembu co-founded what became Zoho in 1996 and grew it into a global maker of business software without venture capital. He moved himself to Tenkasi, a rural district, and opened offices in small towns, training school leavers in-house rather than relying on top universities. He handed over as chief executive in 2025 to focus on research as chief scientist.
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N. R. Narayana Murthy
Born
Software services, Pune and Bengaluru. Murthy and six colleagues founded Infosys in 1981, with seed money famously lent by his wife Sudha. He helped develop the model of doing work for foreign clients from India, shared stock options widely with staff and set a standard for corporate governance and disclosure. It is the template for India's IT services industry, built by first-generation founders.
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Brijmohan Lall Munjal
Born
Two-wheelers, Ludhiana. Munjal and his brothers started making bicycle parts in Ludhiana after Partition and built Hero Cycles into the world's largest bicycle maker, using a dense network of local suppliers. In 1984 Hero partnered with Honda, and fuel-efficient Hero Honda motorcycles such as the Splendor put millions of Indian commuters on two wheels. He died in 2015.
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Venu Srinivasan
Two-wheelers, Hosur and Chennai. Srinivasan led TVS Motor for decades and made it a byword for manufacturing quality, adopting Japanese total quality management so thoroughly that TVS group companies won several Deming Prizes. TVS grew from scooters and mopeds into a large exporter of motorcycles. He has since handed day-to-day leadership to the next generation and is chairman emeritus.
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