Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani

Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani (Hindi: धीरजलाल हीराचंद अंबानी; 28 December 1932 – 6 July 2002) was an Indian industrialist who founded Reliance Industries, a petrochemicals, communications, power, and textiles conglomerate and one of the 3 privately owned Indian companies in the Fortune 500. Ambani took his company public in 1977. Dhirubhai has been among the select few to be figured in the Sunday Times list of top 50 businessmen in Asia.[1] His life has often been referred to as a true "rags to riches" story.
Dhirubhai started off as a small time worker with Arab merchants in the 1950s and moved to Mumbai in 1958 to start his own business in spices. After making modest profits, he moved into textiles and opened his mill near Ahmedabad. He founded Reliance Industries in 1966, and today, the company, with over 85,000 employees, provides almost 5% of the Central Government's total tax revenue. Ambani was credited with introducing the stock market to the average Indian investor, and thousands of investors attended the Reliance annual general meetings, which were sometimes held in a football stadium, with millions more watching on television.[citation needed]

In 1985 after a heart attack Dhirubhai handed over the Reliance empire to his sons Mukesh and Anil. After his death, the group was split into Reliance Industries Limited, headed by Mukesh Ambani, and Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (Reliance ADAG), headed by Anil Ambani.

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Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata

Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata 3 March 1839 – 19 May 1904) was an Indian entrepreneur and industrialist, prominent for his pioneering work in Indian industry. He was born to a Parsi family in Navsari, Gujarat, India.

He founded what would later become the Tata Group of companies. Jamsetji Tata is regarded as the "father of Indian industry".
Jamsetji Tata was born to Nusserwanji and Jeevanbai Tata on 3 March 1839 in Navsari, a small town in South Gujarat. Nusserwanji Tata was the first businessman in a family of Parsi Zoroastrian priests. He started trading in bombay.

Jamsetji joined his father in Bombay at the age of 14 and enrolled at the Elphinstone College. He was married to Hirabai Daboo while he was still a student. He graduated from college in 1858 and joined his father's trading firm. It was a turbulent time to step into business as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 had just been suppressed by the British government.
Jamsetji worked in his father's company until the age of 29. In 1868, he started a trading company with a seed capital of Rs. 21,000. In 1869, he acquired a bankrupt oil mill in Chinchpokli, converted it into a cotton mill and renamed the mill Alexandra Mill. He sold the mill two years later for a healthy profit. Thereafter he set up a cotton mill in Nagpur in 1874. He christened it Empress Mill on 1 January 1877 when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India.

He devoted himself to bringing to fruition four of his key ideas: setting up an iron and steel company, a world-class learning institution, a one-of-a-kind hotel and a hydro-electric plant. Only one of the ideas became a reality during his lifetime. The Taj Mahal Hotel was inaugurated on the 3rd of December 1903

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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

• Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ( 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was the pre-eminent political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement. 
• A pioneer of satyagraha, or resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience—a philosophy firmly founded upon ahimsa, or total nonviolence—Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.
• Gandhi is often referred to as Mahatma or "Great Soul," an honorific first applied to him by Rabindranath Tagore.
• In India, he is also called Bapu  and officially honoured as the Father of the Nation. His birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence.
• Gandhi first employed non-violent civil disobedience as an expatriate lawyer in South Africa, in the resident Indian community's struggle for civil rights. 
• After his return to India in 1915, he set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers in protesting excessive land-tax and discrimination. 
• Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, increasing economic self-reliance, but above all for achieving Swaraj—the independence of India from foreign domination. 
• Gandhi famously led Indians in protesting the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930, and later in calling for the British to Quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years, on many occasions, in both South Africa and India.
• Gandhi strove to practice non-violence and truth in all situations, and advocated that others do the same. 
• He lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn he had hand spun on a charkha. 
• He ate simple vegetarian food, and also undertook long fasts as means of both self-purification and social protest.

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Posted in: Independence Movement