A New Era Is Dawning

The trigger for this article came from a friend, interestingly enough a Gujarati industrialist who remarked, "You Marwaris have lost the Midas touch!"

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Harsh Goenka, Chairman, RPG Group

Common perception and public commentary certainly seemed to corroborate his observation and I was also inclined to agree with him. After all, business discourse in our country since the last decade has overwhelmingly been dominated by a few families and they aren't Marwaris! 

Just the other day, or so I felt, the Birlas, Singhanias, Bajajs, Mittals had been making headlines. But they were now no longer visually prominent. Had they really lost the Midas touch? The comment got me thinking and intrigued enough to delve into it.

My first point of search was data on the Top 50 Business Houses in India. In 1964 there were 13 top Marwari families comprising 26 per cent of the highest echelon in our country. In 1990 the figure had increased to 14 families comprising 28 per cent, and in 2000 it remained static at 14 Marwari Business Houses encompassing 28 per cent of the pie. Consulting the Forbes list of billionaires revealed another interesting statistic. Comparing the number of Marwaris in 2013 that made it to the list of top 100 billionaires of India with those in 2022 showed that while there were 29 Marwaris in 2013, in 2022 the number had gone down to 26, but the number of Marwaris in the first 10 had risen from 2 to 4 in the same period.

While these figures showed the community certainly remained as relevant as in earlier decades as one of the top wealth creators of our country, it was equally obvious they no longer occupied center stage in public discussions.