S unil Bharti Mittal is a self-made Indian billionaire and a pioneer of the country's mobile telecommunications industry. He is the founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises, a diversified conglomerate whose flagship company is Bharti Airtel, one of India's largest mobile network operators. He started his first business as a teenager and, in the early 1990s, when the Indian government began to open up the telecom sector, he successfully secured a license to operate a mobile network in Delhi.

He launched his mobile service under the Airtel brand in 1995. With a groundbreaking business model that involved outsourcing the management of his network infrastructure to partners like Ericsson and IBM, he was able to offer some of the lowest call rates in the world. This strategy fueled an explosive growth in subscribers, and he built Airtel into a telecom giant with operations not only in India but also across Africa and South Asia. He is considered one of the founding fathers of India's telecom revolution.