7 inspiring stories of the early lives of India’s most successful people

Two business partners, Dhirubhai Ambani and Champaklal Damani, started Reliance in a small room with a telephone, one table and three chairs. The partnership broke due to differences within a year but Dhirubhai did not give up on Reliance. And the rest is history.

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He initially shoveled limestone on the shop floor of Tata Steel and handling blast furnace. Thirty years down the line he became the chairman of Tata Sons.

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Did you know that the first company that he founded was a failure? He started Softronics which failed after a year and half. He joined Patni Computer Systems in Pune after that. But he was not a man who gave up. Murthy and six software professionals founded Infosys in 1981 with an initial capital injection of Rs 10,000, which was provided by his wife Sudha Murthy.

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She was the first female engineer hired at India’s largest auto manufacturer Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company. Though she was a gold medallist in her class, she was refused a job at TELCO due to ‘men only’ gender bias. She wrote a personal letter to the Chairman about this at which she was offered a special interview and hired immediately.

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Wipro’s story is a story of a shift from soaps to software. Azim Premji’s father Hashan Premji incorporated a company that made vegetable oils. When his father died, Azim left his studies at Standford University and came back to India to run his father’s company. Under his leadership the company expanded its production of by-products. Later realising the emerging IT field he turned it into an IT services company and changed the name to Wipro.


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Birla started his own venture in textiles. His Eastern Spinning Mills in Kolkata became a success. He was then placed in charge of the corporation's expansion into the oil sector. After his father’s death he inherited a part of the Birla Group. He was the first Indian industrialist who took to global expansion.

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Mittal started his entrepreneurial skills at an early stage of 18 years-old. He started with a capital investment of Rs. 20000(US$290) borrowed from his father. His first business was to make crankshafts for local bicycle manufacturers.

He sold this venture and set out to explore other things. But he failed in each one of them. It was when he was about to give up that opportunity came knocking at his door. While in Taiwan, he noticed the popularity of the push-button phone which India hadn't seen before. This is when he sensed his chance at making it big in the telecom industry.

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