Lhe Frenchman Bernard Arnault is no longer the third richest man on the planet. He has just been dethroned by Gautam Adani, an Indian autodidact almost unknown outside his country. His fortune, estimated at 143 billion dollars (140 billion euros) in Bloomberg Billionaire Ranking, is now on the heels of Americans Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The stock price of his group, Adani Enterprises, is up more than 2,400% since March 2020; it has even doubled since the start of 2022.
What looks like good news for India reveals above all the dysfunctions of its economy, namely the widening of inequalities and the rise of so-called “connivance” capitalism, where the fortunes of billionaires close to power depend on access resources controlled by the state.
Mr. Adani is neither the inventor of a revolutionary technology nor of a disruptive economic model. Its dazzling success is in no way based on innovation. In each of the activities of its conglomerate – airports, ports, mines, aerospace, defense industry – the Indian state plays an important role, whether in the allocation of licenses or the signing of contracts. However, he is rightly known as being close to the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, like him from Gujarat, a state in western India.
The fortune in politics of one coincides with the success in business of the other. Mr. Adani’s wealth rose from 70 million to 7 billion dollars between 2002 and 2014, when Mr. Modi ruled the state of Gujarat, then continued its meteoric rise when the latter became prime minister. The wealth of the businessman has recently jumped 60 billion dollars, in a country where 1% of the wealthiest hold a third of the wealth of India.
Debt burden
The fortune of one also serves the political ambitions of the other. Mr. Adani dropped out of school very early to go into the diamond trade in Bombay, before returning to Gujarat. It was from the construction of a deep-water port and the creation of a special economic zone in Mundra, on a state concession, that he built his empire. A major project that served as a showcase for the “Gujarat economic model” touted by Mr Modi during his 2014 election campaign. Recently, the billionaire got his hands on the NDTV news channel, one of the last bastions of independent journalism, sparking concern in a country which, during of recent years, tumbled to 150e rank out of 180 in the press freedom ranking established by Reporters Without Borders.
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