Anand Piramal

When the 31-year-old son of billionaire Ajay Piramal joined his father’s group in 2011, he skipped the $4 billion conglomerate’s flagship healthcare, glass making and fund management businesses. Instead he set up Piramal Realty. He focuses only on Mumbai and its outskirts, resisting the temptation among developers of going national and burning cash.

The soft-spoken scion wants to create a market leader. “There is no Emaar Properties, no Sun Hung Kai in India,” he said in an August 2015 interview, referring to the real estate giants that built big businesses in Dubai and Hong Kong. Warburg Pincus & Co. and Goldman Sachs paid $417 million last year for small stakes in the company, even though the builder, with 15 million square feet under development, hasn’t completed a single project.

Lenders are forcing debt-laden builders in India to shed assets and opening up buying opportunities for those flush with cash. “My father says you should be like a nimble gorilla so you are able to move quickly, but you should have the capital to move,” Anand said in a March interview.

As the group’s executive director, Anand weighs in on strategic decisions and comes up with quirky solutions. One is a program where buyers can sell their homes back to the company if they don’t like them when they’re completed. In India’s oversupplied home market, that’s gutsy.

Aalok Shanghvi

The elder of the two Shanghvi siblings, Aalok is as media-shy as his billionaire father and India’s second-richest man, Dilip Shanghvi. His father is a first-generation entrepreneur who started out as a small-time medicine distributor in Kolkata in the 1980s and went on to set up India’s largest drug maker in Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., which acquired beleaguered peer Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. and Israel-based Taro Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. to create a global generics producer with annual sales of $4.2 billion.

Aalok shares his father’s entrepreneurial streak and founded PV Powertech Pvt Ltd., which has installed solar panels across Europe, Asia and Africa. He is a graduate in molecular biology from the University of Michigan, unlike his father who had no formal training in pharmaceuticals.

The younger Shanghvi currently manages Sun Pharma’s international business outside of India and the U.S., and was on the board of Taro until July 2013 before resigning and relinquishing the post to his father.

Ananyashree Birla