Women's Day Special: Billionaire Indian women making waves in corporate world

Indian women have proved their mettle in all walks of life, and the corporate sector is no exception. Not only their business initiatives drew world-wide fame, but a number of them raced to become billionaires. With Women’s Day just around the corner, Zee Business takes you through the list of Indian women billionaires who have taken the corporate world by the storm.

Savitri Jindal & family (chairperson, OP Jindal Group) (worth $17.2 billion)

Savitri Jindal is the richest woman in India and also one of the top 10 richest Indians. She is the chairman of steel magnet, OP Jindal Group, whose interest also lies in power generation, infrastructure, and industrial gases.

She took over the group after her husband, Om Prakash Jindal, died in an accident in 2005. She runs the group along with his sons, including Sajjan, who heads the biggest asset, JSW Steel, and Naveen, who manages Jindal Steel & Power.  

Leena Gandhi Tewari, (director, USV group) ($3.7 billion) 

Not many have heard about her before she burst onto the scene with a place in the Forbes List as the second-richest woman in India.

An MBA from Boston University, Tewari is a director of USV, one of India’s oldest and most established pharmaceutical companies. Her husband, Prashant Tweari, is also a director in the company.

USV is in the business of active pharmaceutical ingredients, fixed dosage formulations, peptides, biosimilars and injectables.

Smita Crishna Godrej ($2.8 billion)

Once the richest woman in India, Smita Crishna Godrej, is the third-generation inheritor of the famous Godrej group. She has a one-fifth stake in her family assets.

Her brother Jamshyd runs the company’s consumer goods business, Godrej & Boyce.

Her husband Vijay Crishna has worked in a lot of hit Bollywood movies. He was also on the board of Godrej Industries. 

Falguni Sanjay Nayar (Founder and CEO, Nykaa, $2.8 billion)

She is a supreme example for ambitious woman entrepreneurs who want to make it big in the corporate world.

At the age of 50, she left a top corporate bank’s job to establish her own beauty and lifestyle company, Nykaa.

An Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, alumna, Falguni started Nykaa in 2012 with just $2 million of her own money. But in less than a decade, she transformed it into a billion-dollar company.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Chairman and founder of Biocon group) ($2.2 billion)

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw became a poster businesswoman in the 1990s for scores of women aspiring to start their own business.

Her firm, Biocon, was the first Indian company to manufacture enzymes and export them to Europe and the US.

Biocon is known for its generic medicines and owns Asia’s largest insulin factory in Johor, Malaysia.