Vedanta Resources has made Anil Agarwal one of India’s richest men, with a net worth according to Forbes of US$2.9 billion currently ranking him number 546 on their global list. Starting his company as a tiny scrap metal and then aluminum conductor business in Patna, the capital city of the northeastern Indian state of Bihar, he left there for Mumbai at the age of 19 to explore other career opportunities. However, he soon grew his existing metals business by collecting scrap from other states and selling it in Mumbai, earning him a sizeable fortune. Establishing subsidisary Sterlite Industries in 1986, which manufactured telecom cables, he then realized that he could control his input costs by manufacturing the raw materials himself, and his 1995 acquisition of the faltering Madras Aluminum, which had been put into administration by India’s Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction in 1991, was the foundation of his entire mining empire. Having gone from strength to strength ever since, Agarwal still owns a 100 percent stake in Vedanta through holding group Volcan Investments, and installed his brother Navin Agarwal as Executive Chairman in 2005. Despite frequent criticism over environmental concerns, these have not stopped Agarwal, who is married with two children, from saying that he has no intention to retire any time soon. In 2014, he pledged to donate 75 percent of his wealth to charity, and continues to have multiple philanthropic interests.
