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His Reliance ADAG conglomerate spans from power generation to cinema theatres and his recent $3 billion (£1.5 billion) floatation of Reliance Power was the biggest in India.

He recently reorganised the 15,000 IT staff his group employs in-house to form a group that can tackle contracts for outside parties.

Capgemini said that it would not comment on "rumours or hearsay".

Reliance Communications declined to comment.

IT services companies are the flag bearers of India's economic rise but so far have failed to make inroads into the industry's top tier, leading to intense speculation that they will swoop on a Western rival.

According to a report published in September by Gartner, the analyst, no Indian company figures in the top ten IT service providers in terms of market share.

The highest-ranking was Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India's largest private sector employer, in 35th place with 0.6 per cent of the market.

TCS had one eighteenth the revenues of the market leader IBM, which earned $48 billion from IT services.

Capgemini was in eighth place with 1.4 per cent market share.

Gartner concluded that it would take India's largest IT firms "a number of years to challenge the top service providers … unless they make a major acquisition."

However, analysts say that hammering out a price will be problematic.

George O'Connor, of Panmure Gordon, said: "Mergers for [Indian] companies are structurally hard as the aim is to take a big proportion of the Western company's underlying assets — European workers — and replace them with cheaper offshore ones."

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