Thakur Dan Singh Bisht (1906 – 10 September 1964) was an Indian billionaire philanthropist from Kumaon, Uttaranchal, India. He was referred to as the "Timber King of India", a "champion of the people" and "a prince among men".
The people of Kumaon affectionately remember him as "Maldar" one who is generous with stuff. The architect Laurie Baker and his wife mention their close friend in a memoir 'the maldar who owned most of Pithoragarh. A close business associate of Corbett from whom he bought Grasmere estate in Nainital and Berinag tea estate. Skins of Corbett's killed tigers are housed at Dan Singh's residence the famed 'Bisht Estate'. Corbett took jungle clues from employees who 'earned their living by floating sleepers down the Sarda river for Dan Singh Bisht'. William McKay Aitken marvelled at the sights as he travelled through the estates of Chaukori and Berinag belonging to 'Dan Singh Maldaar' and extolled Berinag tea which was highly sought by London tea blenders'. His donation of DSB college, an unprecedented amount of half a million rupees of cash and about 1.5 million rupees worth of more than 12 acres of land in the heart of Nainital, and buildings promoted admiration and attention from the newly independent Indian Government. 2 million rupees was a lot of money. This was at a time when the rupee was at parity with the pound. Timed to concur with the throwing open of the College, the movie ‘Maldar’ was released, and it was doing moderately well in the rest of India, but running full houses in the Himalayas. The movie was about a young man from a humble background who becomes a ‘Maldar’ – a person with a lot of stuff who hence distributes it, shares it. It was widely rumored that Dan Singh Bisht had been a benefactor for the project as Jagmani pictures, a distributor, had borrowed 70,000 rupees a few years earlier from Dan Singh, see para 24. It was the coming of age of Dan Singh as the unrivalled timber king of India.
At its height his empire, his massive timber depots with attendant offices and bungalows for managers and himself, extended all across the Himalayas from Lahore to Wazirabad in what later became Pakistan, Jammu to Pathankot, Kartanya Ghat and Kaurilya Ghat and C.B.Ganj Bareilly, Bihar and Tanakpur, Kathgodam and Pithoragarh and Haldwani to Goalpara and Garo Hills as well as Bardiya district and Kathmandu in Nepal. Vast properties purchased by him at each location led to his immersion in local folk lore as a folk hero, who rode on a horse, with hands always full to give. The sleepers for the entire British railway system were more or less supplied by him or if not him, his agents in Assam, G.S Bhandari and Jagadish Singh who he used to meet at Gauripur, India at Roopsee airport, which is now defunct. There was no other timber contractor who could leverage his scale. At its height his company, D.S. Bist and Sons, employed over 5000 people and had tens of millions of rupees in business. but was bidding for contracts in the Andamans and even Brazil when Dan Singh Bisht met his untimely death after completing his last purchase of Beldanga Sugar Mill in Murshidabad. He collapsed in his suite at the Grand Hotel (Kolkata) due to health and stress caused by the anti business pandora's box the newly Independent India opened. He had recently sold the plant he had set up at a discount, sensing no solution, as the Government had refused his machinery to leave Calcutta Port despite having first authorized Dan Singh Bist to take a hefty loan to procure the same. The Bisht Industrial Corporation Ltd. which was formed by D. S. Bisht and sons of Nainital in whose favour an industrial licence was granted in 1956 to set up a sugar factory of two thousand tonnes capacity a day at Kichha to meet the 'crying need' of the cultivators, of sugar-cane in district Nainital. But after Dan Singh Bisht sold his shares in 1963, and subsequently died the next year, it did not run even for a day and was ultimately taken over by Government, by an ordinance issued on 12 September 1970 which was replaced by Bisht Industrial Corporation Limited (Acquisition of Undertaking) Act, No. 7 of 1971