Sunil Bharti Mittal and Family

Sunil Mittal bet on connectivity before most Indians had ever made a phone call.

His first business made bicycle parts; his second imported push-button phones. When India liberalised its telecom sector in the 1990s, he founded Bharti Airtel with the view that connectivity was the utility India needed most and had least of. Airtel today serves over 500 million subscribers across India and 14 African countries, and the group holds the single largest stake in Britain's BT Group. In 2025, it acquired an 18.7% stake in Eutelsat, the world's second-largest satellite communications provider, adding another layer to one of the most geographically extended telecom businesses built by an Indian entrepreneur.

What Airtel built across three decades is a voice and data network that reaches rural towns and African markets that no private Indian company had seriously served before. As the next generation takes on expanded roles, the group's range from mobile telephony to satellite communications reflects a consistent preference for infrastructure at a scale that most private businesses do not attempt.