Reliance group chairman Mukesh Ambani is Business Standard's Entrepreneur of the Year (2002).

Among other things, he has steered the Reliance group into the telecom industry and has announced ambitious plans.

The group has also struck huge gas reserves in the Krishna-Godavari basin, merged Reliance Petroleum with Reliance Industries in July 2002, acquired Indian Petrochemical Corporation Ltd early this calendar year and managed a smooth transition after his father, former Reliance group chairman Dhirubhai Ambani, passed away.

Few other businessmen in India have had such an action-packed 2002, and few businessmen have handled things so well.

The only point that went against him was the group's unsuccessful bid for a stake in Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, the international long-distance  telecom company (the Tatas pipped contenders to the post).

Ambani topped an internal Business Standard poll of senior editors that took into account four largely qualitative yardsticks: strategic thinking that resulted in a positive change in the size and structure of the entrepreneur's company or group, restructuring initiatives, which resulted in adding shareholder value and re-rating of the company by the markets, forays and deals that made a significant impact on the way business was done in the industry in which the company or group operated in, and whether his company or group had outperformed the industry it operated in in terms of market price, financial growth and sales.

Ambani qualified on most of these counts, as portrayed in the forthcoming BS 1000, the Business Standard annual magazine that ranks India's top companies.