Who was Dhirubhai Ambani?

Dhirubhai Ambani (1932-2002) founded Reliance, starting as a small spice and yarn trader in Bombay in 1958 and building it into India's largest private company by the time he died. He is the father of Mukesh and Anil Ambani.

Where was Dhirubhai Ambani born?

He was born on 28 December 1932 in Chorwad (some accounts say the adjoining hamlet of Kukaswada) in Junagadh, Gujarat. His father Hirachand Gordhanbhai Ambani was a village schoolteacher.

How did Dhirubhai Ambani start Reliance?

After working for A. Besse & Co. in Aden, he returned to Bombay around 1958 and set up Reliance Commercial Corporation with his cousin Champaklal Damani, trading spices and then yarn from a small rented office. In 1966 he built a textile mill at Naroda near Ahmedabad and launched the Vimal brand.

What was Dhirubhai Ambani's net worth?

Forbes' 2002 billionaires list put 'Dhirubhai Ambani & family' at about US$2.9 billion, ranking 138th in the world. He died in July 2002, a few months after that list was published.

What was Dhirubhai Ambani's education?

He studied at Bahadur Kanji High School in Junagadh and passed his matriculation exam around 1949. He had no college degree; he went to work in Aden as a teenager.

What controversies was Dhirubhai Ambani involved in?

He faced allegations in the 1980s of favourable licensing and duty policies, a customs show-cause notice over Patalganga imports (dropped in 1989), questions over Isle of Man investments (the government found no irregularity in 1983), and the Indian Express campaign against Reliance. He was never convicted of any offence.

When did Dhirubhai Ambani die and who succeeded him?

He died on 6 July 2002 in Mumbai, aged 69, without leaving a will. Mukesh Ambani became chairman of Reliance Industries and Anil Ambani vice-chairman; the brothers split the group in a settlement announced by their mother Kokilaben on 18 June 2005.

Did Dhirubhai Ambani say 'If you don't build your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs'?

There is no reliable record of him saying it; quote researchers trace the line to a 1996 US classified ad and later American motivational speakers. His documented lines include 'Our dreams have to be bigger' from his 1998 Wharton speech.

Dhirubhai Ambani: Reliance Founder's Life Story

Key facts
Born	28 December 1932, Chorwad, Junagadh, Gujarat [1][24]
Died	6 July 2002, Mumbai, aged 69 [31][36]
Family roots	Son of Hirachand Gordhanbhai Ambani, a village schoolteacher, and Jamnaben [4][24]
Education	Bahadur Kanji High School, Junagadh; matriculation, no college degree
Family	Wife Kokilaben; sons Mukesh and Anil; daughters Dipti and Nina
Company/Group	Reliance Industries (founded as Reliance Commercial Corporation, 1958) [1]
Wealth	About US$2.9 billion for “Dhirubhai Ambani & family”, rank 138, Forbes 2002 list [37]
Known for	Building Reliance from a one-table trading office into India’s largest private company; making share-ownership a mass habit in India [2][5]

On a June evening in 1998, in a Bombay banquet hall, the dean of the Wharton School handed a medal to a man who had never been to college. Dhirubhai Ambani was the 24th person to receive Wharton’s Dean’s Medal and the first Indian [30]. The man on stage could no longer use his right hand properly; a stroke twelve years earlier had seen to that. But his speech carried the swagger of someone who had spent forty years proving people wrong.

“Pedigree is no longer of any significance in democratic India,” he said. “It is performance that is crucial.” Then came the line Reliance would later carve into its own history: “Our dreams have to be bigger. Our ambitions higher. Our commitment deeper. And our efforts greater. This is my dream for Reliance. In fact, it is my dream for India.” [2]

It was not false modesty that made him add: “If one Dhirubhai can do so much, just think what a thousand Dhirubhais can do for this country.” [2]

Within four years of that speech he would be gone, and the company the son of a Gujarati schoolteacher left behind would, by its own account, make up nearly 3.5% of India’s GDP and 5% of its exports [7]. He had also been accused, investigated, written about and fought in Parliament more than almost any Indian businessman of his era. Admirers called him the man who taught India to own shares. Critics called him the master of the licence raj. Both were describing the same person.

This is his story, in full.

Where it began

Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani was born on 28 December 1932 in Chorwad, a small coastal village in what was then the princely state of Junagadh in Saurashtra [1][24]. Some accounts, including Hamish McDonald’s 1998 biography The Polyester Prince, place the family’s two-room home in Kukaswada, a hamlet a couple of miles from Chorwad.

His father, Hirachand Gordhanbhai Ambani, was a village schoolteacher. His mother was Jamnaben [4][24]. It was a family of modest means and many children. Sources disagree on exactly where Dhirubhai fell in the line of siblings; Britannica calls him the third of five children [24]. His elder brother Ramnikbhai would become his closest business partner for the rest of his life [73].

Dhirubhai never let anyone forget where he came from. Accepting a lifetime achievement award from The Economic Times in August 2001, he said: “I accept the award as the son of a village school teacher from Gujarat.” [4]

He studied at Bahadur Kanji High School in Junagadh. By his family’s account, he was a restless student who preferred doing to studying. His wife Kokilaben’s 2007 memoir, Dhirubhai Ambani: The Man I Knew, describes him selling snacks to pilgrims at a fair on Mount Girnar as a boy, and says he was active in Junagadh’s student politics during the turbulent months of 1947, when the Nawab of Junagadh tried to take his state to Pakistan. McDonald’s book, based on interviews with his classmates, also records him as an office-bearer of a student body. These are family and biographer accounts rather than documented records, and they should be read that way.

Aden: the school of business

Around the age of 16 or 17, after finishing school, he sailed for Aden, the British-run port at the southern tip of Arabia where Ramnikbhai already worked [19][20][28]. The exact year differs between accounts: Asiaweek and McDonald say 1949; Kokilaben’s memoir says May 1950, when he was 17 [28].

In Aden he joined A. Besse & Co., a French trading house that was one of the biggest commercial firms on the Red Sea and the distributor of Shell products [20]. He started in a junior clerical job and moved to the company’s Shell filling station and bunkering business at the port [1][20]. In his last speech to shareholders, in April 2002, he described himself as having worked “as a sales attendant at the retail outlet of a multinational energy company in Aden” [5].

Aden was where he learned the trade. “It was at A. Besse & Co. that I learnt how a big business should be run,” he is quoted as saying in his wife’s memoir. He also traded on the side in the Aden markets. McDonald records a story Dhirubhai told him in 1991 about noticing that Yemen’s silver rial coins were worth more as metal than as money, buying them and having them melted down. “The margins were small, but it was money for jam,” McDonald quotes him as saying. “I don’t believe in not taking opportunities.”

In 1955 he married Kokilaben, from Jamnagar. Their first son, Mukesh, was born in Aden on 19 April 1957. Anil followed in 1959, then daughters Dipti and Nina.

The first break

Bombay, a table and a chair

In late 1957 or 1958 (Reliance’s own history says 1958; Kokilaben’s memoir says December 1957), Dhirubhai brought his young family back to India and settled in Bombay [1][24]. They lived in a modest flat in Jai Hind Estate in Bhuleshwar.

He described those years himself in December 2000, when Mumbai’s municipal corporation honoured him: “I was born in Gujarat. It is true. But I was re-born in Mumbai… I started my business career in Mumbai with a table and a chair. At Rs 150 per month. My address was care of a telephone number.” [3]

The firm was Reliance Commercial Corporation, set up in 1958 with his cousin Champaklal Damani, who had also worked in Aden [1][21]. Its first office was a small room on Narsinatha Street in the Masjid Bunder area of Bombay [21]. How much capital it started with depends on whom you read. Asiaweek in 1998 said he came back with Rs 15,000 [28]. Mukesh Ambani has said his father “founded Reliance with Rs 1,000” [27]. Other accounts give different numbers again. What is not in doubt is that the sum was small.

Reliance Commercial Corporation began by exporting spices, ginger, turmeric, cashew and similar goods, to the Gulf and Aden, where Dhirubhai had contacts [21][24]. It soon moved into the business that would make him: synthetic yarn.

Yarn, licences and a parting of ways

India in the 1960s ran on licences. Imports of synthetic yarn such as nylon and polyester were tightly controlled, and the government let exporters earn import entitlements (replenishment licences) by exporting. Dhirubhai became one of the most aggressive players in that system, exporting rayon and nylon fabric, sometimes at a loss, to earn the right to import the yarn that Indian weavers badly wanted [25]. Rivals complained. In 1980 he told Business India, as quoted by McDonald: “The schemes were open to everyone. I cannot be blamed if my competitors were unenterprising or ignorant.”

His appetite for risk eventually split the partnership. In 1965 Damani, a cautious trader, and Dhirubhai, who liked to hold big positions in rising markets, parted ways [83]. McDonald reports that the Ambani brothers bought Damani out.

Naroda and “Only Vimal”

In 1966 Dhirubhai moved from trading into making. He bought land in the industrial estate at Naroda, near Ahmedabad, and set up a small mill with a handful of knitting machines, with Ramnikbhai running the plant [1][73]. “Naroda was not a venture, it was a raw adventure!” Kokilaben’s memoir quotes him as saying.

The fabric was sold under the name Vimal, after Ramnikbhai’s son [22][73]. When established cloth wholesalers in Bombay and Ahmedabad boycotted the newcomer, Reliance went around them, selling directly to retailers and building a network of franchised “Only Vimal” shops [22][26]. The slogan, popularised in heavy advertising, became one of the best-known brand lines in India. Reliance’s own exhibition material records 101 Vimal showrooms opening on a single day in the early 1980s [22].

Vimal did more than sell sarees and suiting. It gave Reliance a consumer brand, a cash engine and, most importantly, a reason for investors to believe in it.

Building the empire

1977: the IPO that started an equity cult

In 1977 Reliance Textile Industries went public. In his own words, from his last shareholder speech in April 2002: “It was in the year 1977 that we made our first public offering, raising a small Rs 2.82 crores, from 58,000 investors.” [5] Reliance-linked sources say the issue of about 28 lakh shares of Rs 10 each was oversubscribed seven times [23]. The shares were listed in Bombay and Ahmedabad in January 1978 [23][26].

What set Dhirubhai apart was what came next. Most Indian industrial houses treated public shareholders as a necessary nuisance. Dhirubhai courted them. Reliance paid regular dividends, issued bonus shares and convertible debentures, and drew small investors from towns that had never had a stockbroker. Its annual general meetings turned into public events. In 1985 Reliance held its AGM at the Cooperage football ground in Mumbai, with about 12,000 shareholders present [76]. The next year’s meeting at Cross Maidan reportedly drew 30,000 or more [26].

When Wharton honoured him in 1998, its citation praised him for “revolutionizing the very concept of equity investing in India by creating wealth and value for millions of shareholders” [2]. In his April 2002 speech he claimed that the original 1977 investors had earned a compounded return of 43% a year over 24 years [5]. At the 2012 AGM, Mukesh Ambani said Rs 1,000 invested in the 1977 issue had grown to Rs 7.78 lakh [74]. Those are company figures, but few dispute that early Reliance shareholders did extraordinarily well.

1982: the bear cartel

The most famous story in Reliance folklore took place in the spring of 1982. On 18 March 1982, a group of brokers, widely described as based in Calcutta, began short-selling Reliance shares in large quantities on the Bombay Stock Exchange, betting the price would fall [38][39]. Within half an hour the price slipped from about Rs 131 to Rs 121 [39].

Then a group of buyers who came to be known as “Friends of Reliance” bought the shares on offer, roughly 8.5 to 8.7 lakh of them according to retrospective accounts, and, crucially, demanded physical delivery at settlement instead of letting the sellers roll their positions forward [38][39]. The short sellers did not have the shares. The squeeze was so severe that the Bombay Stock Exchange stayed shut for three trading days while a settlement was worked out [38][39]. The “undha badla”, the penalty the bears paid for failing to deliver, was reported as Rs 50 a share, though some accounts give Rs 25 [38][39].

Who financed the Friends of Reliance was never established. Zerodha’s history of the episode notes that it was “never proven” that Dhirubhai organised the buying [39]. What the episode did establish was his reputation: Reliance was not a stock you could bet against cheaply.

Backward integration: Patalganga

Dhirubhai’s big idea was to go upstream. Reliance began as a weaver of polyester fabric using imported yarn. He wanted to make the yarn, then the chemicals that went into the yarn, then the petrochemicals that went into those.

In 1981 Reliance received a licence for a polyester filament yarn (PFY) plant at Patalganga, near Mumbai, using DuPont technology [78]. It started production in 1982 [82]. Over the following six years Patalganga added polyester staple fibre, linear alkyl benzene, purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and paraxylene units [78][81]. In 1985 the company changed its name from Reliance Textile Industries to Reliance Industries, a signal that it was now a chemicals company [78].

Reliance was famous for building fast and cheap. That claim was one Dhirubhai made often. It was also at the heart of later allegations that some of the capacity and equipment went beyond what licences allowed, covered in the controversies section below.

Patalganga was paid for, in large part, by the investing public. Reliance raised money repeatedly through convertible debentures, which carried interest and later converted into shares [25][78]. Small investors lent Reliance money; when the debentures converted, they became shareholders. The model fed on itself as long as the share price kept rising. When shareholders challenged a big 1988 convertible debenture issue by Reliance Petrochemicals, alleging hasty approval and unfairness to investors, the Supreme Court dismissed the petitions in May 1989, finding no mala fides [16].

1986: a stroke, and the sons step in

In February 1986 Dhirubhai suffered a stroke that left him partly paralysed [25]. He remained chairman and the final word on strategy for the rest of his life, but day-to-day operations passed increasingly to his sons. Mukesh ran projects; Anil handled finance and the capital markets [32][33]. You can read Mukesh’s side of this period in our Mukesh Ambani biography.

The same year, 1986, brought the fiercest attack Reliance ever faced: a long-running campaign by The Indian Express. It is covered in detail below.

The L&T gambit

In 1988 Reliance quietly built a stake of about 12% in Larsen & Toubro, the engineering company [44][45]. In April 1989 Dhirubhai became L&T’s chairman [25]. It was the closest Reliance came to taking over one of India’s blue-chip professional companies.

It did not last. After V.P. Singh’s government took office in December 1989, the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation, one of L&T’s largest shareholders, called an extraordinary general meeting. Finance Minister Madhu Dandavate told the Lok Sabha in April 1990 that the former chairman had announced he would step down [14]. He often called it his biggest defeat, Business Standard has reported [26]. In November 2001 Reliance sold its roughly 10% stake in L&T to Kumar Mangalam Birla’s Grasim [44][78]; SEBI later said Reliance had technically breached takeover-code disclosure rules on the holding [43] (see our Kumar Mangalam Birla biography).

The 1990s: going global for money

When India opened up in 1991, Reliance was ready to borrow abroad. On 27 May 1992 it became the first Indian company to raise money through a global depositary receipt issue [75]. In 1993 it floated Reliance Petroleum, whose issue of convertible debentures raised Rs 2,172 crore, then the largest public issue in Indian history, to help fund a refinery on the Gujarat coast [81].

In January 1997 Reliance sold a US$100 million, 100-year Yankee bond in the United States, the first ever by an Asian company. The issue was oversubscribed about seven times [40][41]. A company that had once struggled to get credit from Indian banks was now borrowing for a century from American investors.

Meanwhile, Reliance built a giant petrochemical complex at Hazira in Gujarat, with its first plants coming on stream in 1991 [81][82].

Jamnagar

The project that defined Dhirubhai’s last years was the refinery at Jamnagar. It was built at a cost of roughly Rs 25,000 crore, with a capacity of 27 million tonnes a year, making it one of the largest refineries in the world when it started [42]. Commissioning began in 1999; the complex was formally dedicated on 28 December 1999, Dhirubhai’s 67th birthday [42].

The refinery turned Reliance from a large textiles-and-chemicals company into an energy company. Dhirubhai saw it as a personal circle closing. “In my youth, I had left India to work as a sales attendant at the retail outlet of a multinational energy company in Aden,” he told shareholders in April 2002. “I had a dream of coming back to my country, and creating India’s own global energy giant.” [5] In 1998 he told Asiaweek that his real competitors were “DuPont, ICI and Shell” [28].

2002: the final year

Dhirubhai’s last months were busy. In April 2002 shareholders approved the merger of Reliance Petroleum into Reliance Industries, which created a company with over 35 lakh shareholders [5]. In June 2002 Reliance took control of the state-owned petrochemical company IPCL after buying a 26% stake from the government for about Rs 1,491 crore, the largest disinvestment deal of that year [7][78].

He also set Reliance on two new paths he did not live to see finished. Reliance Infocomm was building a nationwide mobile network, and Reliance was drilling for gas in the Krishna-Godavari basin off the Andhra coast. The gas discovery, which Reliance named after him, was announced at the October 2002 AGM, three months after his death, with over 7 trillion cubic feet of gas in place [6][72]. At the same meeting Mukesh announced that the Infocomm rollout would begin on 28 December 2002, his 70th birth anniversary [6].

The numbers at the end

For the year ended March 2002, Reliance Industries reported turnover of Rs 57,120 crore, net profit of Rs 3,243 crore and exports of Rs 11,200 crore, making it India’s largest private-sector exporter [6]. A US congressman’s tribute after his death said Reliance accounted for about 16% of the value of the Bombay Stock Exchange [35]. After the merger with Reliance Petroleum, the 2002-03 annual report put Reliance’s contribution at nearly 3.5% of India’s GDP, 5% of its exports and about 10% of the government’s indirect tax revenue [7].

His personal wealth was held through the family’s stake in Reliance. Forbes’ 2002 billionaires list, published a few months before his death, put “Dhirubhai Ambani & family” at about US$2.9 billion, 138th in the world [37]. For comparison, the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2026 values Mukesh Ambani and family alone at Rs 8.63 lakh crore, second in India behind Gautam Adani [61] (see our Gautam Adani biography).

The setbacks and failures

Dhirubhai’s career was not a straight line up. Several of the hardest blows came in the 1980s.

The 1986 stroke. It came at the worst possible moment, just as Reliance was under attack in the press and in Parliament, and it permanently limited his physical ability to work [25].

The Indian Express years. From 1986, a sustained newspaper campaign, parliamentary questions and official inquiries put Reliance on the defensive for several years. Outlook has reported that Reliance’s share price fell sharply in the late 1980s as cases piled up [47]. The customs case and the related allegations are covered below.

Losing L&T. Becoming L&T’s chairman in 1989 and having to step down within about a year, after a change of government, was a public humiliation and a lesson in how quickly political winds could change [14][26].

The cost of the licence-raj model. Dhirubhai built Reliance by mastering a system of permits and licences. That gave him an edge but also meant that his fortunes were tied to who was in power. A government change in 1989 cost him L&T; a finance ministry hostile to Reliance from 1985-87 cost him years of investigations. As he told Asiaweek, people kept asking, “Where did this upstart spring from,” and demanded to see his credentials [28].

Family succession. Leaving no will proved costly [60]. The bitter dispute between his sons that began two years after his death divided the empire he spent 44 years building. It is covered in the Succession section.

Controversies and allegations

Dhirubhai Ambani was one of the most controversial Indian businessmen of his era. He was never convicted of any offence. The matters below are those documented by courts, regulators, Parliament or at least two major publications. Some date from his lifetime; a few, about decisions taken while he was chairman, were litigated after his death.

He did not hide from the criticism. “Controversy is the price to be paid for success,” he told Reuters in an interview quoted after his death [33].

Licences, PTA imports and the Patalganga customs case

Allegation: Critics, led by The Indian Express from 1986 and opposition MPs, alleged that Reliance benefited from government policy decisions on polyester and PTA under the Indira Gandhi and early Rajiv Gandhi governments, and that its Patalganga plant had been built with equipment imported beyond what its licences allowed [10][25][48]. One specific charge, reported by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in Seminar, was that in 1985 banks opened letters of credit for nearly a year of Reliance’s PTA needs just before the government moved PTA off the open general licence, which critics said suggested advance knowledge [25]. On 10 February 1987 the Deputy Collector of Customs in Bombay issued Reliance a show-cause notice alleging unauthorised import of plant and machinery, misdeclaration and under-invoicing, and evasion of duty of Rs 119.64 crore [11].

Response: Reliance contested the customs notice. Dhirubhai’s general position, as he told Business India in 1980 about import schemes, was that the policies were open to everyone and he had simply used them better than competitors.

What happened next:

An MP told the Lok Sabha in August 1986 that a CBI inquiry into the alleged leak of import policy had reportedly been started; no finding from it was found in the public record [10].
On 31 January 1989 the Collector of Customs, Bombay, adjudicated the show-cause notice, found the charges “not established” and ordered them dropped, the government told the Lok Sabha in March 1989 [11].

Status: The customs case was dropped in 1989. The advance-information allegation over PTA was never proven or formally adjudicated in any forum. Closed.

The Isle of Man investments (1982-83)

Allegation: In 1982-83, eleven overseas companies with names such as Fiasco and Crocodile invested about Rs 22.5 crore in Reliance shares under a scheme for non-resident Indian investment. Opposition MPs alleged in the Lok Sabha that they might be fronts for the promoters or for unaccounted money, pointing out that several were incorporated in the Isle of Man around the same time with little capital [9][47].

Response: The government defended the investments. On 14 December 1983 Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee told the Lok Sabha that the Reserve Bank of India had approved them after examining incorporation documents and auditors’ certificates of NRI ownership. “I, therefore, do not find irregularity,” he said, describing an earlier statement that the companies were registered in the UK as a “genuine mistake” [9].

Status: No adverse finding was ever made. The matter was revived by the Express campaign in 1986 but not reopened by any authority. Closed.

The Indian Express campaign and the bank-loans inquiry (1986-88)

Allegation: Beginning in 1986, The Indian Express, owned by Ramnath Goenka, published a long series by S. Gurumurthy and Arun Shourie. It alleged excess and unlicensed capacity, share-price manipulation, and a “loan mela” in which banks lent money to companies that used it to buy Reliance debentures and shares [25][48]. The articles are widely linked to the bitter rivalry between Reliance and Nusli Wadia’s Bombay Dyeing, which made a competing polyester raw material [25].

Response: Reliance contested the reports. According to The Caravan, citing McDonald, Dhirubhai answered in print through publications he influenced, including The Patriot and the Observer of Business and Politics [48].

What happened next:

The Reserve Bank of India scrutinised bank credit to companies linked to Reliance, and on 14 July 1986 set up a committee under the Banking Regulation Act to examine 1985 advances against Reliance shares and debentures, the government told the Lok Sabha [10]. No final outcome of that committee has been found in public records.
In June 1986 the government barred the conversion of non-convertible debentures into equity; official answers did not name Reliance [84].
Gurumurthy was arrested in 1987 in a case he later called politically motivated, Reuters reported [50]. In April 1988 the government told Parliament it had issued FERA show-cause notices to the Indian Express group and Goenka [15].

Status: No court or regulator made an adverse finding against Dhirubhai personally from the campaign. Closed.

The Fairfax affair (1987)

Allegation: While V.P. Singh was Finance Minister, the Enforcement Directorate hired the Fairfax Group, a US detective agency, to trace illegal Indian assets abroad. The Christian Science Monitor reported in April 1987 that the probe “evidently focused” on Dhirubhai Ambani, and that there was speculation that officials had tried to block investigations into Reliance, while noting there was “no evidence so far” of a cover-up [49].

Response: The Rajiv Gandhi government set up a commission of inquiry into the Fairfax engagement itself.

What happened next:

The Thakkar-Natarajan Commission, of two Supreme Court judges, was notified on 6 April 1987 [12].
Its report, debated in the Lok Sabha in December 1987, was read out as finding that it was not safe to engage a foreign private detective agency, that Fairfax was “not competent”, and that it had been chosen by Gurumurthy, “an outsider” [13]. Opposition MPs attacked the report as one-sided [13].

Status: The commission’s findings concerned the hiring of Fairfax, not any wrongdoing by Reliance. No proceeding against Reliance arising from Fairfax’s work was found. Closed.

The 1989 Nusli Wadia murder-conspiracy case

Allegation: On 31 July 1989 Bombay police registered a case alleging that Kirti Ambani, a senior Reliance executive, had conspired with three others to murder Nusli Wadia, chairman of Bombay Dyeing. The case was transferred to the CBI on 2 August 1989 [51][52]. Kirti Ambani was not related to Dhirubhai’s family, Scroll reported [53].

Response: Dhirubhai Ambani was never named as an accused. In a 1990 statement to the CBI, cited in court reporting, Mukesh Ambani said he learned of Kirti Ambani’s possible involvement only after the arrest [51].

What happened next:

Charges of criminal conspiracy to murder were framed against the four accused in 2003 [53].
Kirti Ambani and another accused, Arjun Babaria, died during the long trial [51].
In January 2023 the special CBI court refused a defence request to summon Mukesh Ambani as a witness [52].
In March 2023 the court acquitted the two remaining accused, Ivan Sequeira and Ramesh Jagothia, holding that the conspiracy had not been proved [51].

Status: No one was convicted. Dhirubhai Ambani was never charged. Closed.

The Polyester Prince (1998)

Allegation: In 1998 Australian journalist Hamish McDonald published The Polyester Prince, a critical biography of Dhirubhai covering his methods and political links. McDonald later wrote that threats of legal action led HarperCollins India to pulp its edition, and that Reliance obtained an injunction from a Delhi court [45][46].

Response: Reliance went to court to stop the book’s sale in India [45][46].

What happened next:

The book was never sold in India.
An updated version, Ambani & Sons, was published in India by Roli Books in 2010 and was not blocked [45].

Status: The 1998 book remains unavailable in India; the later version is sold freely. Closed.

Allegation: Two matters concern share issues in 1994, while Dhirubhai was chairman. First, SEBI alleged that when warrants issued in 1994 were converted into shares in January 2000, the promoter group’s stake rose by 6.83%, beyond the 5% creeping-acquisition limit, without an open offer. On 7 April 2021 SEBI fined Mukesh, Anil, Kokilaben and other family members and entities Rs 25 crore [54]. Second, after a 2002 complaint by S. Gurumurthy, SEBI alleged that about 12 crore shares were improperly allotted in 1994 to promoter-linked entities, and filed a criminal complaint in 2020 [57].

Response: Reliance and the family contested both matters, arguing among other things that SEBI had acted decades late [55][56].

What happened next:

On 28 July 2023 the Securities Appellate Tribunal set aside the Rs 25 crore penalty as “without any authority of law” [55].
On 11 November 2024 the Supreme Court dismissed SEBI’s appeal; the bench remarked, “You cannot chase a person like this for 20 years” [56].
In the 12-crore-share matter, a Mumbai court rejected SEBI’s 2020 criminal complaint as time-barred; SEBI sought revision in the Bombay High Court. On 5 August 2022 the Supreme Court directed SEBI to give Reliance the legal opinions it had relied on, saying “a regulator has to act fairly” [57].

Status: The warrants penalty case is closed in the family’s favour. In the 12-crore-share matter, we found no reported final outcome of SEBI’s revision petition as of October 2026. Pending (no reported outcome).

Political influence: the wider criticism

Allegation: Throughout his career, critics argued that Dhirubhai’s success rested on closeness to those in power. Asiaweek wrote in 1998 that his “hefty donations to the party in power and his personal relationships with various leaders are well known” [28]. Voice of America’s 2002 obituary noted that critics accused him of manipulating India’s administration to influence policy and of ruthlessly eliminating competition [31].

Response: Dhirubhai openly acknowledged dealing with government; in an India Today interview quoted by Business Standard, he said he was “willing to salaam anyone” [26]. In his 2001 ET award speech he complained that “creators of wealth are ridiculed in our country” and that “businessmen are labelled as crooks”, adding, “We must learn the difference between a mistake and a crime.” [4]

Status: This is a matter of public debate and historical judgment, not a legal finding. No court found him guilty of corruption. As of 18 October 2026 there are no open legal proceedings against Dhirubhai Ambani himself.

Giving back

Dhirubhai’s philanthropy in his own lifetime was less formal than that of later Indian billionaires, and is thinly documented compared with his business record.

The clearest institution he helped found is the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT) in Gandhinagar, set up under an agreement between Reliance and the Gujarat government. Its first B.Tech classes began on 6 August 2001, while he was alive [65]. In 2024 the Gujarat Assembly passed a law renaming it Dhirubhai Ambani University [66]. After the family split it sits with the Anil Ambani side of the family.

In his December 2000 speech to the Mumbai municipal corporation, he pledged that Reliance would bring computer education to the city’s municipal schools, starting with 51 secondary schools and 68,000 children [3].

Much of his name’s charitable footprint came after his death. The Dhirubhai Ambani International School in Mumbai opened in 2003, with Nita Ambani as founder and chairperson. His ancestral home in Chorwad was turned into a memorial, inaugurated on 28 December 2011 with both his sons present [67]. Reliance’s 5,000-acre clean-energy manufacturing hub at Jamnagar, announced in 2021, is named the Dhirubhai Ambani Green Energy Giga Complex [68].

The state honoured him after his death. India Post issued a Rs 5 commemorative stamp on 28 December 2002 [18], and in 2016 he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously for trade and industry [17]. In his lifetime he received, among others, the Wharton Dean’s Medal (1998) and a place in Asiaweek’s list of Asia’s most powerful people (ranking 31st in 2000) [29][30].

Succession

On 24 June 2002 Dhirubhai suffered a second, severe stroke and was admitted to Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai [36]. He died on 6 July 2002, aged 69 [31]. The next day he was cremated at Chandanwadi crematorium in Mumbai, as crowds chanted “Dhirubhai amar rahe” [34]. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said India had lost “an iconic proof of what an ordinary Indian fired by the spirit of enterprise, and driven by determination, can achieve” [31].

He left no will [60]. At the end of July 2002, Reliance’s board named Mukesh chairman and Anil vice-chairman and managing director [60].

The arrangement did not hold. In November 2004 Mukesh told a television interviewer that there were “ownership issues” in the family, making a private rift public [59][77]. Months of boardroom battles followed. On 18 June 2005 their mother, Kokilaben, announced a settlement [58]. Mukesh kept Reliance Industries and IPCL; Anil took Reliance Infocomm, Reliance Energy and Reliance Capital. The brothers agreed not to compete with each other for a decade [58][59].

What happened next is well known. Under Mukesh, Reliance Industries grew into India’s most valuable company, expanding into retail and, through Jio, back into telecom. Anil’s group borrowed heavily; Reliance Communications entered insolvency in 2019 [80], SEBI barred Anil Ambani from the securities market for five years in August 2024 [62], and the Enforcement Directorate has attached assets in group cases, with investigations continuing as of October 2026 [63][64]. Anil Ambani’s lawyers have contested the proceedings in court [79].

Reliance marks 28 December, Dhirubhai’s birthday, as its Founder’s Day. In December 2025 Mukesh Ambani called him “our Founder, our Teacher and Forever Guide” [70].

A footnote on legacy: Mani Ratnam’s 2007 film Guru, about a Gujarati villager who builds an industrial empire, was widely seen as inspired by Dhirubhai’s life. Ratnam said it was “not a biography” but fiction from which “you can draw parallels” [69].

A second footnote, for anyone searching quotes: the popular line “If you don’t build your dream, someone else will hire you to help build theirs” is often credited to Dhirubhai. Quote researcher Barry Popik traces it to a 1996 American classified advertisement and later US motivational speakers [71]. There is no record of Dhirubhai saying it. His documented words, from Wharton in 1998, are: “Our dreams have to be bigger.” [2]

What their journey teaches

1. Learn the trade before you start the company. Dhirubhai spent the better part of a decade in Aden learning how a large trading house bought, sold, financed and shipped goods before he opened his own office. When he did, he was small but not naive [1][20].

2. Own the customer when the middlemen shut you out. When Bombay’s cloth wholesalers boycotted Vimal, he went around them with direct supply and franchised showrooms. The boycott became the brand [22].

3. Treat small investors as partners, not as a funding source. Reliance’s 1977 IPO raised just Rs 2.82 crore, but its relentless courting of shareholders gave it a base of millions of retail investors who funded its biggest projects [5][7]. Whatever one thinks of his methods, the “equity cult” changed how Indians saved.

4. Scale is a strategy. From Patalganga to Jamnagar, he built bigger than seemed sensible, betting that world-scale plants would make Reliance cheaper than anyone else. “We target market leadership in all our businesses,” he wrote in the 2000-01 annual report [8].

5. Political tailwinds can become headwinds overnight. The licence raj rewarded those who mastered it, but the same closeness to power left Reliance exposed when governments changed, as the 1986-90 investigations and the loss of L&T showed [11][14].

6. Succession is the founder’s last job. He built a company for millions of shareholders but left no will for his own family. The split that followed is a reminder that a plan on paper protects a business better than trust alone [58][60].

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 18 October 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.

Dhirubhai Ambani: Reliance Founder's Life Story

Where it began

Aden: the school of business

The first break

Bombay, a table and a chair

Yarn, licences and a parting of ways

Naroda and “Only Vimal”

Building the empire

1977: the IPO that started an equity cult

1982: the bear cartel

Backward integration: Patalganga

1986: a stroke, and the sons step in

The L&T gambit

The 1990s: going global for money

Jamnagar

2002: the final year

The numbers at the end

The setbacks and failures

Controversies and allegations

Licences, PTA imports and the Patalganga customs case

The Isle of Man investments (1982-83)

The Indian Express campaign and the bank-loans inquiry (1986-88)

The Fairfax affair (1987)

The 1989 Nusli Wadia murder-conspiracy case

The Polyester Prince (1998)

Political influence: the wider criticism

Giving back

Succession

What their journey teaches

Sources (84)

Frequently asked questions

More stories

Where it began

Aden: the school of business

The first break

Bombay, a table and a chair

Yarn, licences and a parting of ways

Naroda and “Only Vimal”

Building the empire

1977: the IPO that started an equity cult

1982: the bear cartel

Backward integration: Patalganga

1986: a stroke, and the sons step in

The L&T gambit

The 1990s: going global for money

Jamnagar

2002: the final year

The numbers at the end

The setbacks and failures

Controversies and allegations

Licences, PTA imports and the Patalganga customs case

The Isle of Man investments (1982-83)

The Indian Express campaign and the bank-loans inquiry (1986-88)

The Fairfax affair (1987)

The 1989 Nusli Wadia murder-conspiracy case

The Polyester Prince (1998)

The 1994 share allotments: SEBI cases after his death

Political influence: the wider criticism

Giving back

Succession

What their journey teaches

Sources (84)

Frequently asked questions

More stories