Anand Jain, Adani, Thapar among 10 Forbes debutants

Ten new people made it to the list of India's top billionaires in the Forbes list of the World's Richest People in 2007.

This includes trader Gautam Adani, who built Mundra Port, Anand Jain, Mukesh Ambani's school buddy; and Gautam Thapar, whose Ballarpur Industries is India's largest paper maker.

The real estate sector also churned out a couple of more billionaires: Niranjan Hiranandani, who built a thriving township in suburban Mumbai, along with his brother; and Rakesh Wadhawan, whose July listing of his company Housing Development & Infrastructure Ltd (HDIL) made him a billionaire.

The other five new entrants to the list of 40 richest Indians are Cyrus Poonawalla, L Madhusudhan Rao, Vikas Oberoi, Anu Aga and Gracias Saldanha.

Overall, the four richest Indians are worth an astonishing $180 billion. Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal is No. 1 again, worth $51 billion, but Reliance Industries' Mukesh Ambani is rapidly closing the gap. His net worth jumped $30.5 billion to $49 billion, making him the year's biggest gainer, moving up from rank 56 to rank 14 in 2007.

Anil Ambani wasn't far behind and also saw his net worth increasing $30.2 billion to $45 billion. Anil moved up from rank 104 last year to rank 18 in 2007.

Kushal Pal Singh, worth $35 billion after the listing of DLF, is now the world's richest real estate developer.

Had these four (Mittal, the Ambani brothers and Singh) been worth as much in March, when Forbes last published the list, they would have ranked among the world's 10 richest people.

Three of them would have been new to the top 10; Mittal was already ranked fifth. Together, the foursome is worth more than the 40 richest Chinese combined.

Helped by a soaring stock market, when the BSE Sensex shot up 53 per cent in the past year and a strong rupee, which appreciated by 12 per cent, the Indian billionaires saw their wealth surge by $351 billion, more than double of last year ($170 billion), making India's 40 billionaires the wealthiest group in all of Asia.

Forbes has raised the bar""the minimum net worth required to make it to the list was $1.6 billion, up from $790 million last year""which meant that several people who were part of the list last year dropped out of the list this year.

This included Jet Airways founder Naresh Goyal, who saw his fortune improve by 55 per cent to $1.55 billion, Nandan Nilekani and Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, founders of Infosys, and Jignesh Shah, who founded the commodities exchange MCX.

The other people who couldn't make it to the list by a whisker were five newly minted billionaires, including pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Murali K Divi and India's bullish investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala.