The 2.5 was also subject to inflation (we're talking ~15 years, in a developing nation; that's a lot of inflation). In real terms, it's a huge discount - far in excess of the benefits of keeping some fraction of that for the local economy.

In the meantime, I don't believe the wealthy are exercising a substantial form of control here.

Background: India was without effective sanitary pads for most of human history. Recently, in the past few hundred years or so, some people became fantastically wealthy. At some point, several sanitary pad manufacturers were set up that sold their products, mostly in developed nations and not rural India.

Are you saying wealthy people stopped the people of India from manufacturing their own sanitary pads before this guy came around to the scene? They certainly didn't stop these people after he came around. It looks to me more like there just wasn't anyone who bothered to bring the sanitary-pad manufacturing technology there yet: the wealthy who were interested in the pursuit of money were pursuing easier or more profitable opportunities, and the wealthy interested in making a difference in the world (including those who would just give money away) were unaware of this need.

There are plenty of things that plenty of wealthy people/businesses can/actually do that keep the little man down in plenty of situations. This just... doesn't look like one of them. Poverty is the natural state of Man.

As demonstrated by this article, the uber-rich are not able to deny local markets permission to do things for themselves. The uber-rich simply failed to figure out how to market pads themselves. If Ambani had figured out the marketing, this would just be another story of Reliance incrementally moving into another industry and making a bunch of money.

Trying to paint the uber-rich as some sort of villain here is silly.

The really interesting thing is that this is an example of the value of marketing.

It is a giant ponzi scheme, what are you gonna do :|. One of the most expensive things one can own is a house, but the house of a poor person is many times cheaper than the house of a rich person. Add the race to have a bigger house and you have got inflation - just when you start to earn 1000 times more you need to pay 2000 times more if you want to live with people of same status.