Who is Sunil Bharti Mittal?

Sunil Bharti Mittal is the founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises and Bharti Airtel, a telecom company with about 681 million customers in 15 countries. He was born on 23 October 1957 in Ludhiana, Punjab.

What is Sunil Mittal's net worth in 2026?

Forbes India's 100 Richest 2026 list puts 'Sunil Mittal & family' at No. 5 with US$32.9 billion, based on prices as of 11 September 2026. Hurun's India lists show a much lower figure (Rs 99,300 crore in 2025) and its 2026 list places the family outside the top 10.

How did Sunil Mittal start his business?

He started in 1976, at 18, making bicycle crankshafts in Ludhiana with capital usually put at about Rs 20,000. He then traded metals, imported Suzuki generators until the government banned imports, moved into push-button phones, and won the Delhi mobile licence that became AirTel in 1995.

Where is Sunil Mittal from and what is his education?

He is from Ludhiana in Punjab, the second of three sons of the Congress politician and Rajya Sabha MP Sat Paul Mittal. He graduated from Panjab University in 1976.

What was the 2G spectrum case involving Sunil Mittal?

The CBI did not name him in its 2012 charge sheet over extra spectrum allotted in 2002, but a special court summoned him as an accused in March 2013. The Supreme Court set that summons aside on 9 January 2015, and the special court discharged his company, Bharti Cellular, in October 2015.

Is Sunil Mittal related to Lakshmi Mittal?

No. Sunil Bharti Mittal of Bharti Airtel and the steel magnate Lakshmi Niwas Mittal of ArcelorMittal are not related.

Who will succeed Sunil Mittal at Airtel?

Airtel is run by professional managers: Gopal Vittal is executive vice chairman and Shashwat Sharma is chief executive of the India business. Mittal has a new term as chairman until September 2031 and says the family will stay on as anchor shareholder; he has not said which family member will lead it.

How much of Airtel does the Mittal family own?

The family controls Airtel through Bharti Telecom, which owned 39.51% of Bharti Airtel at the end of June 2026. The family holds 50.56% of Bharti Telecom and SingTel the rest, so the family's own economic interest is a little under a quarter.

Sunil Bharti Mittal Biography: From Cycle Parts to Airtel

Key facts
Born	23 October 1957, Ludhiana, Punjab [51] [52]
Family roots	Ludhiana; the second of three sons of Sat Paul Mittal, a Congress politician and Rajya Sabha MP [54] [42]
Education	Bachelor’s degree, Panjab University, 1976 [43] [53]
Family	Wife Nyna Mittal; twin sons Shravin (deputy chair, Airtel Africa) and Kavin (founder of Hike); daughter Eiesha Bharti Pasricha (trustee, Bharti Airtel Foundation); brothers Rakesh and Rajan, both vice-chairmen of Bharti Enterprises [103] [19] [35]
Group	Bharti Enterprises: Bharti Airtel (India and 14 African countries), Indus Towers, and large stakes in Britain’s BT Group and the satellite operator Eutelsat [7] [83] [17]
Wealth	US$32.9 billion, No. 5 on Forbes India’s 100 Richest 2026, listed as “Sunil Mittal & family” (prices as of 11 September 2026) [89]. On the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2026 but outside its top 10 [92]; No. 19 with Rs 99,300 crore on Hurun’s 2025 list [91]
Known for	Building Airtel from one mobile licence in Delhi into what the company, citing GSMA Intelligence, calls the world’s second-largest mobile operator by customers [33]

When Sunil Mittal ordered the equipment for his first mobile network, he was taken to lunch at the headquarters of Ericsson, the Swedish supplier. The order was worth US$27 million, and Ericsson had announced the win on screens around the building. Then Mittal told his host, Kurt Hellström, that he had one request. “I don’t have money to pay you” [43].

He had arranged the 15% advance, he said. The other 85% would have to wait. Hellström asked when he would be paid. “I will pay you on happiness,” Mittal replied. Asked to describe happiness, he said it was the day people were making calls on the street and were happy with them. By Mittal’s account, told to a Harvard Business School interviewer in 2017, Hellström thought for less than half a minute, put out his hand and said, “Done” [43].

Three decades later, the company built on that handshake serves about 681 million customers in 15 countries [7]. On 18 May 2026 Bharti Airtel overtook HDFC Bank to become, that day, India’s second most valuable listed company after Reliance Industries [78]. Forbes puts the Mittal family’s fortune at US$32.9 billion, fifth on a 2026 list headed by Gautam Adani and one place below the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who is no relation [89].

The road in between ran through a business wiped out overnight by a government order, a US$10.7 billion African purchase that Mittal himself later called rushed, a price war that finished off most of his rivals, and a quarterly loss of Rs 23,045 crore. It also ran through a courtroom: in 2013 a trial judge summoned him as an accused in a spectrum case, a summons the Supreme Court later set aside.

This is the story of how a politician’s son from Ludhiana, starting with capital usually put at Rs 20,000, took on the Tatas, the Birlas and the Ambanis in one of the most capital-hungry businesses in the world, what went wrong along the way, and what the public record shows.

Where it began

Sunil Bharti Mittal was born on 23 October 1957 in Ludhiana, Punjab [51]. He was the second of three sons of Sat Paul Mittal, whom Business Today once described as “a provincial politician and freedom-fighter from Ludhiana” [54].

The father’s career was in public life, not business. Sat Paul Mittal entered the Punjab Legislative Council in 1961, served as the state’s deputy minister for home, and sat in the Rajya Sabha from 1976, twice elected and once nominated [42]. He died in January 1992 [42] [48].

His son remembers a man who “would be very comfortable in his khadis, sitting with heads of states” [47]. He also remembers one piece of advice. “When I was 18, just out of college, he would tell me that if I can give five years of my time now to my dream, it would take care of the rest of my life,” Mittal said in 2011. “While all my friends were in movies, dating, and travelling, I was just on my scooter, working hard” [47].

The town did the rest. “I was raised in Ludhiana, a very industrious town, where almost everybody is an entrepreneur of some kind,” he told Knowledge at Wharton [44].

He was not, by his own account, a star student; mathematics was his “biggest bug” [47]. He graduated from Panjab University in 1976 [53]. (We could not confirm the schools that many profiles name, so we have left them out.)

All three brothers went into business, and all three are still in the group: Rakesh, the eldest, and Rajan, the youngest, are vice-chairmen of Bharti Enterprises [48] [54] [19].

The first break

Crankshafts and a scooter

In 1976, fresh out of college, Mittal set up a small hot-forging unit to make crankshafts for bicycles. “That’s where I cut my teeth on business,” he says [44]. The starting capital is usually given as Rs 20,000 [53]; Fortune put it at US$1,500, borrowed from his father [50]. Mittal himself says only that his capital in those years was “very-very modest” [43]. His customers were Ludhiana’s cycle makers, among them Hero and Atlas [43]. Within three years he had added small units making yarn and stainless steel sheets [18].

“I would always be a small supplier to some of these people because they would never let you grow,” he said in 2026. “You had to break free from the established businesses into something new” [45].

Around 1979-80 (accounts differ on the year) he left Ludhiana and set up Bharti Overseas Trading to import steel, brass, plastics and zip fasteners [43] [50] [18]. The journalist Vir Sanghvi, who profiled him in 2005, wrote that Mittal remembered sitting on low stools in Bombay’s Pydhonie market, persuading traders to buy his steel sheets [48].

The business that vanished in a day

His first big business came from a chance meeting with a salesman from Suzuki, who was looking for an Indian dealer for the Japanese company’s portable generators. In a country of power cuts, Mittal saw the market at once and became Suzuki’s agent for India [48] [50]. Within about three years, he says, he was the world’s largest importer of portable generators from Japan, with small offices in four metros [43].

Then the government awarded licences to make generators in India to two large business houses, the Birlas and the Shrirams, and banned imports to protect them [48] [50]. Sources date the ban anywhere between 1982 and 1984 [51] [48] [50]. Nobody disputes the effect. “It was all gone, just like that,” Mittal told Fortune, snapping his fingers [50]. “I couldn’t get one more shipment in,” he said elsewhere. “Overnight, I had no business” [43].

There was a second blow. Suzuki, Mittal says, asked that he be given a dealership for the new Maruti car. He was turned down. Years later he called it luck: “it was God’s design that I should not get too comfortable” [48].

A push-button phone in Taiwan

He went looking for the next product: Japan, then Seoul, then Taiwan. At a trade fair there, which he dates to October 1982, “I saw a push-button phone for the first time in my life” [43]. “I knew instantly this was the big one,” he told Fortune [50].

Finished phones could not be imported. So he had them broken down into parts in Taiwan and put together again in India [43]. He sold them under the name Mitbrau. As he told Sanghvi, “all it meant was Mittal brothers, but I wanted to make it sound like a foreign brand name” [48].

In 1986 Bharti Telecom was set up and signed a technology agreement with Siemens of Germany; a plant in Ludhiana began production in June 1987 [20]. Answering machines followed in 1989 through a tie-up with Japan’s Takacom, and cordless phones in 1990 with Lucky Goldstar of South Korea [18]. The brand was Beetel [43].

It was still a small business inside the licence raj. His first licence to make cordless phones capped sales at Rs 2 crore. “It’s ridiculous when you go back,” he said [44]. When the 1991 reforms swept those controls away, he says, Manmohan Singh’s Budget speech “was like Freedom Day for us” [45].

The licence

In January 1992 the government invited private companies to bid for mobile phone licences in the four metros. According to Sanghvi, Mittal read the news in The Economic Times while on a New Year holiday in Goa and decided to bid; his father died within days [48] [42].

Bharti’s entire sales were then about US$5 million [44]. Mittal handed the factories to his brothers and moved to London, where, Fortune wrote, he “spent lavishly on outside experts” to learn the mobile business [50]. His partners in the bid were the French utility Compagnie Générale des Eaux (later Vivendi), Emtel of Mauritius and a network planning firm, Mobile Systems International [20] [2].

Thirty bidders applied. The Supreme Court’s record of the tender shows that the government’s evaluators ranked Bharti first in all four cities, before the minister noted that a party should get only one [2]. Bharti was first given Bombay. Rival bidders, the Tatas among them, went to court, and after a Supreme Court ruling in July 1994 ordered parts of the selection to be reconsidered, Bharti ended up with Delhi [2] [43]. “Delhi was always my first preference, anyway,” Mittal says [43].

AirTel launched in Delhi on 27 September 1995, with free airtime for the first few weeks and paid service from 14 November [21]. It was Delhi’s first mobile service [21], and came two months after India’s first, Modi Telstra’s in Calcutta [56]. In those early years a mobile call cost about Rs 16 a minute, and incoming calls were charged too [56].

Bharti’s first cost estimate of US$25 million was too low by a factor of four, Fortune reported. “People told me this was a business for companies with deep pockets,” Mittal said. “Had we known how deep, we’d never have tried it” [50].

Building the empire

Losing the auctions, winning the war (1995-2002)

When the government auctioned licences for the rest of the country in 1995-96, bigger groups outbid Bharti almost everywhere. It won only Himachal Pradesh for mobile [20] [48]. Asked on television why he had lost, Mittal said he did not have the money, and predicted “blood on the streets” for the winners [48].

He was right. Within “two or three years the other companies started falling like ninepins,” he told Fortune. “They couldn’t even pay the licensing fee. They struggled, and we were ready” [50].

Being ready meant having partners with money. The private equity firm Warburg Pincus invested US$292 million between 1999 and 2001 and made US$1.83 billion when it sold in 2004 and 2005, by Business Standard’s count [61]. In August 2000 Singapore’s SingTel agreed to invest US$400 million, which it called the largest single foreign investment in Indian telecom [62].

With that money Bharti bought the map. It took control of JT Mobiles in 1999 and of SkyCell in Chennai in 2000 [18]; by August 2000 it was operating in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka as well as Delhi and Himachal Pradesh [62]. In July 2001 it bought Spice Cell in Kolkata for US$90 million. “How many people can seal a $90-million acquisition (of Spice) in 48 hours?” Mittal asked Business Today [55].

In February 2002 Bharti Tele-Ventures went public in what the company called India’s first 100% book-built issue: shares at Rs 45, raising about Rs 834 crore [22] [59]. By 24 July 2002 the share had fallen to around Rs 30 [60].

Then Reliance entered mobile telephony in 2002-03 with a big bang. Mittal recalls the share touching Rs 19, and says of that period: “The question was not if, but when would we collapse” [43]. He gathered 40 to 50 managers in Agra. Most wanted to fight Reliance head-on. He sided with the few who argued for lying low and conserving cash [43].

The minutes factory (2003-2007)

Growth then created its own crisis: Airtel was adding customers faster than it could build networks. In 2004 Mittal did something that seemed reckless for a telecom company. He handed the network to its suppliers.

Ericsson signed a US$400 million contract in February 2004 to run and expand Airtel’s network, with about 250 Airtel engineers moving to Ericsson [34]. Nokia signed a similar deal [18]. IBM took over the IT systems in a deal estimated at US$700-750 million over ten years, with its payments tied to Airtel’s revenue [63].

He recalled that “everyone said I had gone mad to give my heart out to outsiders”. He told his board: “I offer you my neck. If this model fails, I’ll resign” [47].

The model turned fixed costs into costs that rose only when traffic did. Rivals copied it: by 2011, Fortune noted, Vodafone, Idea and others followed the same model [57]. Airtel applied the same thinking to towers, pooling them with Vodafone and Idea in a joint venture, Indus Towers, in 2007 [18].

By September 2005 Bharti was India’s largest mobile operator, with 14.1 million customers and a 21.8% market share. That October Vodafone agreed to pay about Rs 6,656 crore for a 10% economic interest [16]. The company was renamed Bharti Airtel in 2006, crossed 50 million customers in 2007 and 100 million in 2009 [18].

Africa: the US$10.7 billion bet

Mittal wanted to build an Indian multinational. He tried twice to combine with South Africa’s MTN. In 2008 he walked away after MTN proposed a structure that would have made Bharti its subsidiary [64]. In 2009 a US$14 billion cash-and-share deal for 49% of MTN collapsed when the South African government would not accept its structure [65].

In June 2010 Bharti completed the purchase of the Kuwaiti group Zain’s mobile operations in 15 African countries, with 42 million customers, at an enterprise value of US$10.7 billion [23]. It raised about US$7.5 billion of debt from a group of banks, plus a rupee facility equivalent to US$1 billion from State Bank of India [66].

Africa proved much harder than India: many small markets, each with its own regulator, currency and politics. Debt piled up. In 2015 Airtel sold about 8,300 African towers for more than US$1.7 billion to pay some of it down [67].

Mittal has been unusually frank about the mistake. “There was a feeling of regret that we rushed into it too fast,” he said in 2024 [49]. When Airtel Africa listed in London in June 2019, it was priced at the bottom of its range and valued at about £3.1 billion (US$3.9 billion). That was far below the 2010 price tag, though the two figures are not strictly comparable [68].

But he did not sell, and the numbers eventually improved. In the year to March 2026 Airtel Africa reported revenue of US$6.4 billion, profit after tax of US$813 million and 183.5 million customers in 14 countries [13]. On 22 June 2026 Bharti Airtel raised its stake from 62.73% to about 79% by issuing its own shares, worth about Rs 28,200 crore, to a promoter-group company of the Mittal family in exchange for that company’s 16.31% of Airtel Africa. Shareholders had approved the related-party deal almost unanimously [10] [28] [84]. On 1 October 2026 Airtel Africa priced a London listing of its mobile-money arm, Airtel Money, at a market value of about £5.3 billion, with trading expected to begin on 14 October [14].

The Jio shock (2016-2021)

In September 2016 Mukesh Ambani launched Reliance Jio with free calls and, at first, free data. Mittal later counted it among the “several near-death experiences” his company has been through, describing “predatory pricing, subsidized phones, all sorts of things” [72]. (The competition regulator rejected Airtel’s complaint that Jio’s pricing was predatory; see below.)

Airtel’s average revenue per user (ARPU) fell from Rs 158 to Rs 116 in a year, and its India business reported a loss in the March 2018 quarter [70]. Airtel picked up Telenor’s Indian business without paying cash, and the Tata group’s consumer mobile business [69] [18]. Vodafone merged with Kumar Mangalam Birla’s Idea. By Mittal’s count, “nine out of the 12 operators packed up, went bankrupt, merged with us or with each other” [72].

Then, in October 2019, the Supreme Court ruled against the operators in a long-running dispute over licence fees (see the AGR section below). Airtel reported a loss of Rs 23,045 crore for a single quarter [71].

Mittal’s answer was to raise equity, again and again: a rights issue of about Rs 25,000 crore in 2019, another of Rs 21,000 crore in 2021 [75], and in 2022 an investment of up to US$1 billion from Google [76]. And he campaigned openly for higher prices. “USD 2 for 16 GB a month is not sustainable,” he said in 2020; the industry needed an ARPU of Rs 300 [73]. He also warned that “if India goes down to just two operators, that will be tragic” [74].

Prices did rise. In July 2024 Airtel raised mobile tariffs by about 10-21% and repeated that ARPU “needs to be upwards of INR 300” [85] [30]. By the June 2026 quarter Airtel’s ARPU was Rs 264 [7].

Airtel today

For the year to March 2026 Bharti Airtel reported revenue of Rs 2,10,973 crore, up 22%, and net income before exceptional items of Rs 26,904 crore [9]. At the end of June 2026 it had 680.9 million customers: 491.9 million in India and 189 million in Africa [7].

It has used its cash to prepay Rs 66,665 crore of high-cost spectrum dues to the government by March 2025 [31], and took majority control of Indus Towers in 2024 [77]. (For the wider picture of India’s investment boom, see CapitalVia’s analysis of capital spending in the economy.)

Satellites, BT and Haier

Outside Airtel, Mittal has made three large bets through the family’s holding companies.

OneWeb. In July 2020 Bharti and the British government each put in US$500 million to buy the bankrupt satellite-internet company OneWeb [5] [79]. In 2022 France’s Eutelsat agreed to combine with OneWeb in an all-share deal [80], and in March 2023 an ISRO rocket completed OneWeb’s 618-satellite constellation [81]. After a fund-raise by the combined company in November 2025 the French state was its largest shareholder with 29.65%; Bharti, once OneWeb’s biggest owner, held 17.88%, with Mittal as vice-chairman [17]. In March 2025 Airtel also agreed to bring Elon Musk’s Starlink, OneWeb’s main rival, to its customers in India [32], five months after Mittal had said satellite companies that want to serve urban retail customers “need to buy the spectrum as telecom companies buy” [143].

BT Group. In August 2024 Bharti agreed to buy about 24.5% of BT, which had itself been an investor in Bharti from 1997 to 2001 [25]. The British government cleared the deal after a national-security review [82], and Mittal joined BT’s board in September 2025 [15]. In May 2026 Reuters, citing the Financial Times, reported that the government would oppose any increase; Bharti said it had no plans for one [83].

Haier India. In December 2025 Bharti and its old backer Warburg Pincus said they would together own 49% of the Chinese appliance maker Haier’s Indian arm [26].

How the wealth is held

Mittal controls Airtel with far less than half its shares, through a chain of companies.

At the top is a family company, Bharti Enterprises (Holding). It owns 50.56% of Bharti Telecom; SingTel owns the other 49.44%. Bharti Telecom in turn owned 39.51% of Bharti Airtel at the end of June 2026, a stake worth about Rs 4.65 lakh crore on 9 July, none of it pledged [12]. A family vehicle, Indian Continent Investment, holds about 3% directly, and SingTel has a direct holding too, taking the promoter group to about 50% [58] [8].

Do the arithmetic on those filings and the Mittal family’s own economic interest in Airtel is a little under a quarter. Reuters put SingTel’s holding at 27.5% after a sale in November 2025, more than the family’s then or now [87]. Control sits with the Mittals because they hold the majority of Bharti Telecom.

SingTel has been selling down. In 2022 Bharti Telecom agreed to buy about 3.3% of Airtel from it, with the family raising debt to pay [86]. Bharti Telecom and the family holding companies above it together carried about Rs 46,050 crore of gross debt on 9 July 2026 [12]. Mittal’s stated goal is for Bharti Telecom to get back above 50% of Airtel within a decade [88].

This structure is also why wealth estimates differ so widely. Forbes, which counts the family fortune, said US$34.2 billion in 2025 and US$32.9 billion in 2026 [90] [89]. Hurun’s 2025 list said Rs 99,300 crore, roughly a third of the Forbes figure for that year [91].

The setbacks and failures

Mittal’s career has more public failures than most billionaires would admit to. The generator ban, the lost auctions, the 2002 share-price collapse, two failed MTN deals and the costly entry into Africa are described above. There were others.

The businesses outside telecom mostly did not scale. A tie-up with Walmart, which Mittal had called “transformational” and which became a 50:50 wholesale joint venture in 2007, ended in a split in October 2013 [50] [24] [94]. Bharti Retail, which ran the Easyday supermarkets, was merged into the Future group in 2015 [18]. In insurance, where Bharti had partnered France’s AXA since 2005, it is giving up control: in May 2026 Britain’s Prudential agreed to buy 75% of Bharti Life [18] [27]. Of his insurance, food and real-estate ventures Mittal said in 2024 that “they didn’t go to plan and there are no regrets” [49].

The next generation’s start-up closed. Hike, the messaging app founded by his son Kavin and valued at US$1.4 billion in 2016, shut its messenger in 2021, moved into real-money gaming and announced in September 2025 that it was shutting down, after India banned such games [93].

What stands out is the pattern of response: measured, never all-in. “We do take a lot of risks,” he said in 2026, “but it’s not aar-ya-paar” [45].

Controversies and allegations

Telecom is one of India’s most regulated and litigated industries, and Airtel has spent much of its life in court against the government, rivals and regulators. Below are the main matters, the responses, and where each stands as of 8 October 2026.

The 2002 additional spectrum case

Allegation: In December 2012 the CBI filed a charge sheet against former telecom secretary Shyamal Ghosh and three companies, Bharti Cellular, Hutchison Max and Sterling Cellular. It alleged that extra spectrum was given to operators in 2002 at too low a charge, causing a loss of about Rs 846 crore to the exchequer [1] [106]. The CBI did not name Mittal; the Supreme Court later recorded that the agency had questioned him and found no case against him [1]. On 19 March 2013, however, Special Judge O.P. Saini summoned Mittal and two other executives, among them Essar’s Ravi Ruia, as accused anyway, reasoning that they were the “alter-ego” of their companies [104].

Response: Mittal challenged the summons in the Supreme Court. His lawyers argued that the 2002 decision was a government policy that benefited all operators, including the state-owned ones, so there could be no criminal intent, and that the CBI had deliberately not named him [105].

What happened next:

On 9 January 2015 a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice H.L. Dattu set aside the summons against Mittal and Ruia. It held that “there is no vicarious liability unless the statute specifically provides so” and that the trial judge had applied the alter-ego principle “in an exactly reverse scenario”. The trial court remained free to summon them if evidence emerged [1].
On 15 October 2015 the special court discharged Shyamal Ghosh and the three companies, including Bharti Cellular, saying there was no incriminating evidence, and sharply criticised the CBI’s charge sheet [106].
In August 2023 the Delhi High Court, on the CBI’s plea, struck out the trial judge’s remarks about the agency because its officers had not been heard. Its order records that the CBI did not challenge the discharge itself [4] [107].

Status: Closed. Mittal was never charge-sheeted or tried, and the discharge of his company stands. The 2015 ruling is now a standard precedent on when company heads can be summoned in criminal cases; the Calcutta High Court relied on it in 2023 to quash criminal proceedings against him in a customer’s complaint [108].

AGR dues

Allegation: This was a dispute over money, not an accusation of fraud. Operators pay licence fees as a share of “adjusted gross revenue” (AGR). The telecom department said AGR included income such as rent, interest and asset sales; the operators said it covered only telecom revenue. A 2017 audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General said six private operators, Airtel among them, had understated revenue by about Rs 61,000 crore in all [119] [109].

Response: The operators fought the definition for years. When they lost, Airtel paid Rs 13,004 crore on its own calculation plus Rs 5,000 crore as an “ad-hoc payment” to cover any difference, and later asked the court to correct what the operators called errors in the government’s sums [111] [114].

What happened next:

On 24 October 2019 the Supreme Court upheld the government’s definition, with interest and penalties [109].
On 14 February 2020, with the dues unpaid, the court issued contempt notices to Airtel and other operators [110]. It later rejected their own calculations, saying self-assessment could not be allowed “even in wildest dreams”. The government’s figure for Airtel was Rs 43,980 crore [112].
In September 2020 the court gave operators ten years to pay [113]. Curative petitions were dismissed in 2024, and a further plea for a waiver in May 2025 [114] [115].
In October 2025 the court allowed the government to reconsider the dues of Vodafone Idea, in which the government itself holds about 49% [116]. The telecom department declined to do the same for Airtel [117]. Airtel paid a little over Rs 9,000 crore on 30 March 2026, Business Standard reported; the telecom minister said it would have to go to the Supreme Court for any relief [118].

Status: The judgment is final and Airtel is paying in instalments. Estimates of what remains differ: Business Standard put it at just over Rs 30,000 crore after the March 2026 payment [118]; Outlook Business, citing the communications ministry, put Airtel’s total AGR dues at Rs 51,091 crore at the end of December 2025 [117]. We found no report of a fresh petition by Airtel as of 8 October 2026.

The Jio interconnection penalty and the cartel complaint

Allegation: Soon after its launch in 2016, Reliance Jio complained that Airtel, Vodafone and Idea were not giving it enough interconnection points, so that more than three in four calls on its network were failing. In October 2016 the regulator TRAI recommended penalties of Rs 1,050 crore each on Airtel and Vodafone and Rs 950 crore on Idea [120]. Jio also told the Competition Commission of India (CCI) that the three had acted as a cartel, and the CCI ordered an investigation in April 2017 [3].

Response: “Points of interconnect have been liberally given,” Mittal said in October 2016 [121]. When the demand came in 2021, Airtel called it “arbitrary and unfair” and the allegations “frivolous and motivated” [122]. Its own complaint that Jio’s free offers were predatory was rejected by the CCI in June 2017 [125].

What happened next:

The Bombay High Court quashed the cartel investigation, and on 5 December 2018 the Supreme Court agreed, holding that TRAI had to decide the telecom questions first [3] [124].
The Digital Communications Commission, the telecom ministry’s top decision-making body, approved the penalty in June 2019, and the telecom department sent Airtel a demand for Rs 1,050 crore in September 2021 [120] [122].
Airtel went to the telecom tribunal TDSAT, which in October 2021 barred the government from encashing its bank guarantees for the time being [123].

Status: The CCI’s investigation order was quashed, and we found no report of any cartel finding. The penalty was under challenge before TDSAT when last reported; we could not find a report of a final ruling as of 8 October 2026.

Airtel Payments Bank and Aadhaar

Allegation: In December 2017, following complaints that Airtel had opened Airtel Payments Bank accounts for mobile customers without their “informed consent” while verifying their SIM cards with Aadhaar, the Aadhaar authority UIDAI temporarily barred Airtel and the bank from Aadhaar-based e-KYC. Cooking-gas subsidies had flowed into those accounts: about Rs 190 crore belonging to some 31 lakh customers [126] [127].

Response: Airtel offered to return the Rs 190 crore with interest [126]. It deposited an interim penalty of Rs 2.5 crore with UIDAI, the bank’s chief executive left, and the company ended its ties with more than 1,000 retailers [127].

What happened next:

The Reserve Bank of India fined the bank Rs 5 crore in March 2018 for breaking know-your-customer rules [127].
The bank was allowed to sign up customers again in July 2018 [128].

Status: The RBI imposed its penalty and the bank resumed enrolment in 2018; we found no report of further action. Mittal was the bank’s non-executive chairman from April 2016. In August 2026 the bank announced that he would leave its board on 30 September 2026 [101].

Walmart’s investment and the FDI rules

Allegation: In 2012 a CPI member of the Rajya Sabha, M.P. Achuthan, alleged that Walmart’s 2010 investment of about US$100 million in convertible debentures of Cedar Support Services, a Bharti company that owned the Easyday retail chain, broke the then ban on foreign investment in multi-brand retail [129] [94] [131].

Response: “(There is) no violation. It is as per the law of the land,” said Rajan Bharti Mittal, vice-chairman and managing director of Bharti Enterprises [129].

What happened next:

In November 2012 Walmart disclosed that its inquiries into possible breaches of the US anti-bribery law covered India [130].
In October 2013 the partners split [94]. Days later PTI quoted an unnamed senior official as saying the Enforcement Directorate had found “no contravention of foreign exchange laws”, the rules having since been amended, and had no basis to take the probe further; The Wall Street Journal carried a similar report [131].
In June 2019 Walmart agreed to pay about US$282 million to settle US anti-bribery charges covering four countries, including India, where the findings, as reported, said its joint venture and retail business had retained intermediaries who made improper payments to officials. The case was against Walmart; the report names no Bharti company [132].

Status: We found no report of a formal closure order, or of any action against the Bharti group.

Electoral bonds

Allegation: After the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bonds scheme in February 2024 [137], published records showed that Bharti group companies had bought bonds worth Rs 247 crore between 2019 and 2024, of which Rs 236.4 crore went to the BJP [136]. Newslaundry, Scroll and The News Minute jointly reported that Rs 150 crore of this was bought in November 2023 and January 2024, around the time OneWeb’s Indian arm got a space authorisation and Parliament passed a law allowing satellite spectrum to be assigned without auction, as Bharti had wanted. The report said the bond data “raises troubling questions”; it did not allege a proven quid pro quo [135].

Response: The reporters said Bharti Enterprises had not responded to their questions at the time of publication. The government’s stated reason for the policy was that satellite spectrum is assigned administratively across the world [135].

Status: The bonds were bought under a scheme that was in force at the time. In August 2024 the Supreme Court declined to order a special investigation into alleged quid pro quo by bond donors in general, saying the claims rested on assumptions at that stage [138]. We found no report of any authority alleging wrongdoing by the Bharti group in this matter.

Other regulatory disputes

Allegation: Four smaller matters are often raised.

Foreign-exchange inquiries. The finance ministry told the Rajya Sabha in written replies in 2011 and 2012 that the Enforcement Directorate was looking into suspected foreign-exchange and money-laundering law contraventions involving Bharti Airtel, without giving details [139] [140].
One-time spectrum charge. In 2012 the government decided to levy a retrospective charge on operators’ spectrum holdings [141].
Tanzania. President John Magufuli said in 2017 that the state had been cheated of its shares in Airtel Tanzania [142].
Net neutrality. Critics said Airtel’s December 2014 plan to charge extra for internet calls, and its Airtel Zero platform of April 2015, which let users open participating apps without data charges, favoured some apps over others [133] [134].

Response: Airtel said in 2011 that it complied with all rules [139]. It challenged the spectrum charge in court [141], and Bharti Airtel disputed the Tanzanian claim [142]. It dropped the internet-call plan within days [133].

Status: We found no report of any notice, penalty or closure in the foreign-exchange inquiries. The Bombay High Court quashed the spectrum charge on 8 June 2026; the government can appeal [141]. In Tanzania, Bharti Airtel agreed in January 2019, after talks between Magufuli and Mittal, to raise the government’s stake from 40% to 49% [142]. TRAI ruled out differential pricing in February 2016, and no penalty was reported [134].

As of 8 October 2026, we have found no conviction, criminal charge or regulatory finding against Sunil Mittal personally in any of the matters in this section.

Giving back

The Bharti Foundation, now the Bharti Airtel Foundation, was set up in 2000 [19]. Its best-known work is the Satya Bharti Schools, free schools in villages, started in 2006 [36] [39]. There are 147 of them in four states with more than 34,650 students; a separate programme supports teaching in some 1,200 government schools [37]. The network is smaller than it once was: in 2012 there were 254 schools [39]. In 2024-25 the foundation spent about Rs 185 crore [35].

In November 2017 the family pledged 10% of its wealth, then about Rs 7,000 crore, to the foundation. Most of it was to go into Satya Bharti University, a science and technology university offering free education to students from poorer families, with a first session planned for 2021 [95] [96]. No such university has opened, and the foundation’s 2024-25 annual report does not mention one [35]. Instead, the foundation backed the new Plaksha University in 2020 [97], and in 2024 launched scholarships that pay the full fees, hostel costs and a laptop for students from low-income families at India’s top 50 engineering colleges. It aims to support 4,000 scholars at a cost of over Rs 100 crore a year; 276 were chosen in the first year and 500 in the second [98] [38].

Nyaya Bharti, announced in 2015, gives legal and financial aid to poor undertrial prisoners; Mittal said he would take a Rs 5 crore cut in his annual pay to help fund it [40].

Honours have followed: the Padma Bhushan in 2007 [52]; the mobile industry body GSMA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in March 2026 [41]; and an honorary knighthood (KBE), announced in February 2024, the first given to an Indian by King Charles III [99] [6].

He never followed his father into politics, though he admits he once toyed with the idea. The then BT chairman, Christopher Bland, talked him out of it. “Each time you feel like joining politics, go and take a shower,” Bland told him [48].

Succession

“I have always said that we are a family in business, but we are not a family business,” Mittal told Business Standard in September 2026 [46].

At Airtel that has meant professional managers. Gopal Vittal, the long-serving chief executive, became executive vice chairman on 1 January 2026, and Shashwat Sharma took over as chief executive of the India business [29]. Mittal says he signs none of the spending: “The Rs 35,000 crore of capex every year, I don’t get to sign 35 paise out of this” [46].

He is stepping back in stages. In July 2026 he retired as chairman of Airtel Africa, handing the chair to Vittal, with his son Shravin, 39, as deputy chair [100] [46]. He was due to leave the board of Airtel Payments Bank on 30 September 2026, under a change announced in August [101]. But he remains chairman of Bharti Airtel: the board and shareholders have approved a new five-year term to September 2031 [11] [102].

Of his other son he says: “Kavin is a technologist, he can add a lot of value to Airtel on the digital front.” The family will remain the anchor shareholder, with one member as its face, but he has not said who [46].

The plan he has spelled out is about ownership, not job titles. Over “the next decade”, as he hands “the reins to the next generation”, he wants Bharti Telecom back above 50% of Airtel, so that whoever follows him sits as a controlling shareholder over a professionally run company [88].

What his journey teaches

A door slammed shut can point you to a bigger room. The generator ban destroyed a profitable business in a day. The search for a replacement took him to push-button phones, and from there to telecom.

When you are small, go where the big players are not. “If you are competing with the big boys in areas where they are strong, there’s no chance for you to succeed,” he says [44].

Pick speed over perfection. “If you’re caught between speed and perfection, always choose speed, and perfection will follow,” is his rule [44].

Borrow strength, and give up something real for it. At every stage he tied up with someone bigger: Suzuki, Siemens, SingTel, Warburg Pincus, Ericsson, IBM, Google. Each time he gave away equity, margin or control that others would have guarded. He kept the customer.

Know when not to fight. He chose to lose the 1995-96 auctions rather than overbid, and lay low when Reliance attacked in 2002-03. Both times the patient choice looked weak and turned out right.

Say the mistake out loud, then stay and fix it. Few founders call their biggest acquisition rushed while still running the company. Mittal did, and kept the African business through its hardest decade.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 8 October 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.

Sunil Bharti Mittal Biography: From Cycle Parts to Airtel

Where it began

The first break

Crankshafts and a scooter

The business that vanished in a day

A push-button phone in Taiwan

The licence

Building the empire

Losing the auctions, winning the war (1995-2002)

The minutes factory (2003-2007)

Africa: the US$10.7 billion bet

The Jio shock (2016-2021)

Airtel today

Satellites, BT and Haier

How the wealth is held

The setbacks and failures

Controversies and allegations

The 2002 additional spectrum case

AGR dues

The Jio interconnection penalty and the cartel complaint

Airtel Payments Bank and Aadhaar

Walmart’s investment and the FDI rules

Electoral bonds

Other regulatory disputes

Giving back

Succession

What his journey teaches

Sources (143)

Frequently asked questions

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