The mother of the groom-to-be, Nita Ambani, wore a necklace worth valued at some $60 million, which Business Insider noted was perhaps one of the biggest shows of wealth.
Almost half of the 1.4 billion people in India live below the median poverty line of $3.65 a day, per the World Bank, and activists say the ostentatious displays of wealth are an affront to the country's poor.
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'It feels unfair'
"There is so much poverty all around," said Shyam Bihari, a Delhi fruit seller and social worker, in a conversation with BI.
"It feels unfair to see this amount of money being spent on a wedding when so many people are still unable to access basic necessities like food and water," he said.
Large swathes of India's population have long grappled with food insecurity and water scarcity.
According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of the world's undernourished people live in India. WaterAid says that around 35 million Indians lack access to safe water.
Rajni Haldia, a Delhi-based cleaner who earns $25 a month, told BI that she felt "very bad" watching the coverage of the lavish pre-wedding festivities while knowing the extent of poverty in India.
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Haldia said: "I hope all the rich people who came to India for the wedding are seeing the difference between the rich and poor, and I hope the government can do more to tackle this."
Rakhi Tripathi, a peace activist and associate professor at New Delhi's FORE School of Management, told BI that the extravagant celebrations show a "disconnect" between India's elite and the rest of the population.
The groom-to-be's father, Mukesh Ambani, has an estimated net worth of $113 billion, making him the richest person in Asia and the 11th richest person globally, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Kar noted that the family is known in India for its extravagance, and lives in a skyscraper.
She said: "Their house itself in Mumbai is a stark reminder of the kind of disparity of wealth, where you can sort of visually see this massive house for one family over the slums around their area."
In 2011, Ratan Tata, another of India's richest men, told The Times of India: "It's sad because this country needs people to allocate some of their enormous wealth to finding ways of mitigating the hardship that people have."
The Ambani family does donate to charitable efforts through the Reliance Foundation. That body, founded by Nita and Mukesh Ambani, is one of the largest nonprofits in the country.
The wedding also featured a communal dinner that fed some 51,000 local residents in Gujarat, The Hindu reported.
But, still, Kar suggested that the tens of millions spent on the festivities could have been spent on charitable initiatives, like addressing child malnutrition.
She said: "The amount of spending they had on one event could certainly go toward a much larger program for that kind of thing."
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