Biography | Mukesh Ambani — The Matunga Labs Where He Learned to Build Plants

The Institute of Chemical Technology sits on Nathalal Parekh Marg in Matunga, opposite VJTI, on sixteen acres that still carry the old name in every alumni conversation: UDCT.

It opened on 1 October 1933 as the University Department of Chemical Technology of the University of Bombay. Mukesh Ambani took his bachelor's in chemical engineering here in the 1970s and finished in 1979, according to CNN's chronology and the company's own chairman page.

The building he walked into was not a business school. It was a factory-facing lab, run in those years under the shadow of M. M. Sharma, the physical chemist who trained a generation of Indian process engineers.

Reliance later put the degree on the record. In June 2025 Ambani returned to the same campus to announce a 151-crore rupee grant, which Indian Express and India TV both reported as guru dakshina to the institute and to Sharma.

That visit is useful because it confirms, from his own later act, which campus formed him. Hill Grange High School and a stretch at St. Xavier's College came first. Cathedral and John Connon, often dropped into Mumbai rich-lists, is not his school.

What UDCT gave him was the only technical language the later plants required. Polyester filament, PTA, and a grassroots refinery are chemical-engineering problems before they are capital problems.

He left Matunga for Stanford's MBA and did not stay long enough to collect it. The degree that stuck is the one from this street.

The main block still faces Nathalal Parekh Marg. The rear wall runs along Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road. A visitor looking for the 1970s institute will find the same plot, under a new legal name, still teaching the same trade.

Photo: UDCT Wadala campus, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons