ENTERTAINMENT INDIA

Dhirubhai H. Ambani

Founder Chairman, Reliance Industries Limited, India

December 28, 1932 - July 6, 2002

Birthplace: Chorwad, village in Saurashtra (Gujarat), India

Father's Name: Hirachand Govardhandas Ambani

Mother's Name: Jamunaben Hirachand Ambani

Career:

At the age of 17 went to Aden (now part of Yemen) and worked for A. Besse & Co. Ltd., the sole selling distributor of Shell products.

In the year 1958 returned to Mumbai and started his first company, Reliance Commercial Corporation, a commodity trading and export house.

In the year 1966, as a first step in Reliance's highly successful strategy of backward integration, he started the textile mill in Naroda, Ahmedabad.

In the year 1975, a technical team from the World Bank certified that the Reliance textile plant was "excellent by developed country standards."

In the year 1977, the company went public.

Credited with a number of financial innovations in the Indian capital markets. Today, the Reliance Group has one of the largest family of shareholders in the world. With an investment of over Rs 36,000 crore (US$ 9 billion) in petroleum refining, petrochemicals, power generation, telecommunication services and a port terminal in a three-year time frame, has steered the Reliance Group to its current status as India's leading textiles-petroleum-petrochemicals-power-telecom player.

Achievements: Voted India's 'Top Businessman' in the 'Best of India' poll conducted by Zee News, August 2003.

Petrotech Society conferred posthumously the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' for his outstanding contribution to Downstream Petroleum Industry in India, January 2003.

Rated as one of 'India's Most Admired CEOs' for the fourth consecutive year in the Business Barons - Taylor Nelson Sofres - Mode Survey, July 2002.

Conferred the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' by India HRD Congress, February 2002.

Conferred 'The Economic Times Award for Corporate Excellence for Lifetime Achievement', August 2001.

Felicitated by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai with a citation at a civic reception, December 2000.

Reliance was founded as a textile mill in 1966 by Dhirubhai H. Ambani, the founder Chairman of the Reliance group. It continued to be a textile company until the early eighties.

Reliance later started seizing opportunities thrown up by a combination of the growing Indian economy and the opening up of the regulation-driven sectors of the economy. These included petrochemicals and plastics. Beginning with the early eighties, Reliance pursued a policy of backward integration from textiles as well as diversification. It set up world-scale facilities for manufacturing polyester and textile intermediates, plastics and polymer intermediates, detergent intermediates, etc.