news details |
|
|
| Jamnagar: Where Gujarat Refines the World’s Energy, and Builds Its Future | | | How “Navyug Gujarat na Shilpi”, Mukesh Ambani made Jamnagar home to the world’s largest refining hub and the new energy giga factories of tomorrow
In Part 1, we saw how Dhirubhai Ambani turned India’s savers into shareholders. This week: the son who inherited that legacy and multiplied it.
Think of what an Indian family buys, what it watches and how it connects with the world. In a single generation, Reliance found a place in all of it.
The textile mill at Naroda had first made Reliance a name in Indian homes. Mukesh Ambani took that connection much further. Reliance Retail brought organised shopping to cities and small towns alike. Media and entertainment, digital services and, eventually, telecommunications followed. Reliance had gone from making the yarn in a family’s clothes to becoming part of its everyday life.
Bigger than what he inherited
Building a great enterprise is hard. Inheriting one, and making it far larger, is a different kind of test.
When Dhirubhai Ambani passed away in 2002, Reliance was already one of India’s most important industrial groups. Many expected his successor simply to protect what had been built. Mukesh Ambani set himself a bigger task: to carry forward his father’s philosophy of thinking big, investing ahead of demand and reshaping entire sectors.
The approach in every new business was the one Dhirubhai had pioneered: enter sectors with enormous potential, invest at scale, challenge prevailing assumptions and create new markets.
Jamnagar: a symbol of what India can build
Nowhere is this ambition more visible than on the Saurashtra coast. Under Mukesh Ambani, Jamnagar grew into the world’s largest single-site refining complex, a place where Indian engineering operates at global scale and where energy that powers markets across continents is processed.
Jamnagar became much more than an industrial address for Gujarat. It brought investment, jobs, skills and an ecosystem of suppliers and service providers, and put the state firmly on the world’s energy map. Today, the same region is home to the Dhirubhai Ambani Green Energy Giga Complex, marking Reliance’s move into the energy of the future.
The bond with investors endures
Through all this growth, one part of the founder’s legacy remained untouched: the bond with public investors.
In 2006, Reliance Petroleum came to the market with a major public issue, bringing another large Reliance business within reach of ordinary investors. It merged with Reliance Industries in 2009. For families who had followed the Reliance story since 1977, it was one more chapter in a relationship built over decades.
The father had shown India’s middle class that it could own a share of industrial progress. The son showed what that progress could look like at a global scale. That is why Mukesh Ambani can rightly be called “Navyug Gujarat na Shilpi”, the architect of new-age Gujarat.
But the most dramatic chapter was yet to come, and it would begin not in a boardroom, but at the family’s own dinner table.
A partnership across generations
Jamnagar was not the achievement of one family alone. It stands on Gujarat’s land and coastline, built by its workers and sustained by its faith in a business that had always shared its rewards. That partnership has grown with every generation, from the shareholders of 1977 to the communities that today power Reliance’s global reach. Gujarat has never watched this story from the sidelines. As it enters its next chapter, the state that helped write it once again has a place at the table. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
