Steel tycoon L. N. Mittal and the Ambani brothers topped the Forbes list of Indian billionaires, relegating Wipro chief Azim Premji — who topped the list for several years — to the fourth spot.

Industrialists Mukesh and Anil Ambani have moved ahead of Wipro chief, Azim Premji, in ‘India’s 40 Richest’ list as the share prices of the companies owned by both brothers flared up in the last one year.

According to the magazine’s special report on India’s 40 richest persons, NRI steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, has maintained his top place with a networth of $25 billion. Mukesh’s assets rose to $18.5 billion and Anil’s networth to $ 14.8 billion, thus grabbing the second and third places on the list respectively.

Unlike Forbes’ World Billionaires List, this ranking has been broadened to include family fortunes, Forbes said. Thus if the Ambani brothers, who run diversified business empires, had stayed together, their collective fortunes (Mukesh: $18.50 bn and Anil: $14.80 billion) would have surpassed that of Mittal by a wide margin. Anil’s move to list Reliance Infocomm also helped him in the rich-rich sweepstakes.

Azim Premji has slipped to the fourth position with a fortune of $14 billion followed by real estate major DLF’s chairman Kushal Pal Singh at the fifth slot. There are five newcomers in the list this year including owner of Sun TV Kalanithi Maran, promoter of construction firm Unitech, Ramesh Chandra and Jignesh Shah, who set up commodities exchange MCX.

Two others who’ve returned to the list are automobile major M&M’s chairman Keshub Mahindra, and Infosys Technologies co-founder, K. Dinesh. This year’s dropouts include Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw.

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