Anil Agarwal and Family

Anil Agarwal built Vedanta by buying state-owned mines and making them work.

Agarwal started his working life as a metal scrap trader in Patna. From that beginning, he built Vedanta into a London-headquartered natural resources conglomerate with operations spanning zinc, aluminium, copper, oil and gas, iron ore and silver across India, Africa and beyond. The path ran through a series of large acquisitions of state-owned assets: BALCO, the aluminium company, acquired in 2001; Hindustan Zinc, the country's dominant zinc producer, in 2002; and Cairn India, a major oil and gas producer, in 2011. Each transaction was contested and each required heavy investment in capacity, technology and workforce to extract value from assets that had been underinvested under public ownership.

Vedanta is today the world's largest integrated zinc producer (per Hindustan Zinc) and a significant force across the other commodities it operates in. The current capital expenditure programme runs to $10 billion across metals, zinc, oil and power businesses. Agarwal signed the Giving Pledge in 2021, committing to give away 75% of his wealth.