How a Ludhiana bicycle parts maker became India’s lord of the rings

Sunil Bharti Mittal, the chairman of Bharti Enterprises, is completing 50 years as an entrepreneur, having started out in 1976 with a modest bicycle-parts business in Ludhiana. His journey from a small manufacturing unit took him to the chairman’s office of one of India’s largest business groups and also India’s lord of the ‘rings’ as Bharti Airtel remained India’s largest mobile operator by subscriber base for nearly a decade, from 2009 until the Vodafone-Idea merger in 2018.