Shapoor Pallonji Mistry and Family

The Shapoorji Pallonji Group has been building other people's most important buildings for 160 years. That is its own form of permanence.

There is a version of nation-building that involves owning things, and there is a version that involves constructing them. The Shapoorji Pallonji Group has spent 160 years doing the latter: the Reserve Bank of India building, the Taj Mahal Palace hotel restoration, the royal palace in Oman, and critical civil infrastructure that tends to be noticed only when it fails. The group has operated not as a developer of its own assets but as a builder of other people's most consequential ones.

The family is among India's largest private employers in the construction sector, and the group has expanded into real estate development and engineering over recent decades as the next generation has taken on leadership. Their contribution to the built environment is cumulative and largely uncelebrated in the way that sustained execution over a very long period rarely attracts attention. The buildings stand as the record.