A true rags-to-riches story, Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, has been undisputedly India’s most enterprising entrepreneur. Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani (Dhirubhai Ambani) was born on 28 December 1932, at Chorwad, Junagadh (now the state of Gujarat, India) to Hirachand Gordhanbhai Ambani and Jamnaben in a Modh family of very moderate means. Dhirubhai Ambani is said to have started his entrepreneurial career by selling “pakora” to pilgrims in Mount Girnar over the weekends. When he was 16 years old, he moved to Aden, Yemen. He worked with A. Besse & Co. for a salary of Rs.300. Two years later, A. Besse & Co. became the distributors for Shell products, and Dhirubhai was promoted to manage the company’s filling station at the port of Aden. He was married to Kokilaben and had two sons, Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani and two daughters, Nina Kothari and Deepti Salgaocar.
In 1962, Dhirubhai returned to India and started the Reliance Commercial Corporation with a capital of Rs.15, 000.00. The primary business of Reliance Commercial Corporation was to import polyester yarn and export spices. Dhirubhai started his first textile mill at Naroda, near Ahmedabad and launched the brand “Vimal”. He later diversified into petrochemicals and sectors like Telecommunications, Information Technology, Energy, Power, Retail, Textiles, Capital Markets and Logistics.
He rose from humble beginnings to create India’s largest industrial empire, and in the process, became one of the world’s richest men. He rewrote India’s corporate history for which he was featured among the select Forbes billionaires list. He also figured in the Sunday Times list of top 50 businessmen in Asia.
Dhirubhai was a known risk taker and he considered that building inventories, anticipating a price rise, and making profits through that was good for growth Ambani handed over the day-to-day running of the company to his sons, Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani, in the mid-1980s but continued to oversee the company until shortly before his death in 2002.
Credited for starting the equity cult in India, Dhirubhai was praised for his key role in shaping India’s stock market culture by attracting hordes of retail investors to a market monopolized by state-run financial institutions. He never followed the traditional way and was often targeted for his business strategies due to which he courted controversy all throughout his life. The ‘Dhirubhai school of management’ firmly believed that the only things which mattered were the results and the benefits which infiltrated directly to the shareholders.
He won many awards and accolades during his lifetime. In 2000, he was conferred the ‘Man of the Century’ award by Chemtech Foundation and Chemical Engineering World for his contribution to the growth and development of the chemical industry in India. In 1998, he was awarded the Dean’s Medal by The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, for setting an outstanding example of leadership. Dhirubhai Ambani was also named the “Man of 20th Century” by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). A perfect amalgamation of grit and determination, Dhirubhai believed in his dreams and he lived it. He believed “Dhirubhai will go one day. But Reliance’s employees and shareholders will keep it afloat. Reliance is now a concept in which the Ambanis have become irrelevant.”
Ambani’s great achievement was that he showed Indians what was possible. With no Oxford or Yale degree and no family capital, he achieved what the elite “brown sahibs” of New Delhi could not: he built an ultramodern, profitable, global enterprise in India itself. What’s more, he enlisted four million Indians, a generation weaned on nanny-state socialism, in an adventure in can-do capitalism, convincing them to load up on Reliance stock.
Still, Ambani seems destined to be remembered as a folk hero—an example of what a man from one of India’s poor villages can accomplish with ambition.
Entrepreneurship Development Cell 
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