“I was the first to make push button phones in India...
SUNIL BHARTI MITTAL, 64
The Bharti Enterprises chairperson was one of the first off the blocks when the telecom revolution hit India. Decades later, after the bruising tariff wars, Bharti Airtel is among the three big telecom players left standing in India
It’s hard to imagine the telecom tsar of India sitting on the floor of railway compartments taking his consignment from one location to another. It was the India of the 1970s and ’80s. We were a deprived lot—from telephone connections to rations—there were curbs and limits to everything, including your ambitions. Sunil Bharti Mittal, then just 19, started with making cranksets for local bicycle manufacturers and used to travel from city to city to deliver parts. He then graduated to importing portable electric-power
