Mukesh D. Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd., attends the Ajay Mushran Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, India, on Sunday, July 10, 2011.

Asia's richest man is about to given Amazon's Jeff Bezos a run for his money.

Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, is close to launching his own e-commerce platform – Reliance Retail – to compete with Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart in India, according to people familiar with the matter.

Reliance is one of India's most powerful companies with a growing retail presence across India, a market dominated by neighborhood bodegas, or kiranas.

Ambani's goal is to create an online marketplace similar to Alibaba that will let offline merchants and kirana stores sell their goods online to Indian consumers, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the marketplace is still a work in progress. With 500 million internet users and e-commerce growing 30% a year, Morgan Stanley estimates that online retail in India will become a $200 billion opportunity by 2027.

Reliance has also played a key role, through mobile broadband unit Reliance Jio, in getting more Indians online by subsidizing the cost of internet broadband.

"Reliance Jio introduced nearly free mobile broadband a couple years ago and that really created an environment where everyone was really beginning to get addicted to using the internet on the go," Dinesh Moorjani of Comcast Ventures told CNBC in April. (Comcast is the parent of Comcast Ventures and CNBC.)

India's Economic Times and Bloomberg previously reported on some of the details of Reliance's plans.

On the ground in Mumbai, everyone from rikshawalas to corporate executives are using Jio. And analysts say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reelection could create a favorable regulatory backdrop for Reliance.