Forbes has released its annual edition of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women and, six Indian women made it onto the coveted list this year. These women serve as a symbol of India's rising political and economic influence on the global platform.
Nirmala Sitharaman, the finance minister, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the CEO of Biocon, and Falguni Nayar, the founder of Nykaa are three of the six Indians who have made it onto Forbes' annual list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women.
The minister, who was ranked 36, has now been on the list four times. Falguni Nayar of Nykaa is ranked 89th, while billionaire entrepreneur Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is placed 77th.
The other Indians in the list include Roshni Nadar Malhotra, chairwoman of HCLTech, ranked number 53, followed by Madhabi Puri Buch, chairwoman of SEBI, who is ranked number 54, and Soma Mondal, chairwoman of the Steel Authority of India, who is ranked number 67.
Nirmala Sithraman
Sitharaman, ranked at number 36, has appeared on the list four times in a row. The 63-year-old minister was ranked 37th on the list in 2021, after placing at 41st in 2020 and 34th in 2019.
Nirmala Sitharaman is a politician from India who has been the country's minister of finance and corporate affairs since 2019. Since 2014, she has been a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament. Previously, Sitharaman held the position of India's Defense Minister, making her the country's second female defence and finance ministers after Indira Gandhi and the first full-time female minister to hold each of those ministries. She formerly held the positions of Minister of State for Commerce and Industry with independent charge and Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs under the Ministry of Finance. She was the Bharatiya Janata Party's national spokesman before that.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
Ms Mazumdar-Shaw, is described by Forbes as one of India's richest self-made women. In 1978, she established the largest listed biopharmaceutical company by revenue in India. The business has entered the lucrative US market with success, it said.
Indian tycoon and billionaire Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is an entrepreneur. She is the founder and executive chairman of the Bangalore, India-based biotechnology companies Biocon Limited and Biocon Biologics Limited, as well as the former chairperson of the Indian Institute of Management. She received the Othmer Gold Medal in 2014 for her outstanding contributions to the advancement of chemistry and science. She was listed among the top 50 businesswomen in 2011 by the Financial Times. She was ranked 68th on Forbes' list of the most powerful women in the world in 2019. She was recognised as the 2020 EY World Entrepreneur of the Year. She is married to John Shaw.
Falguni Nayar
Forbes profiled the former investment banker Falguni as an entrepreneur who left her job to launch Nykaa, a retailer of beauty products, in 2012. Nykaa currently operates more than 100 physical stores throughout India.
Falguni Sanjay Nayar is an Indian millionaire businesswoman who is the founder and CEO of the beauty and lifestyle retail brand Nykaa, originally known as FSN E-Commerce Ventures, an acronym of her own name. One of two self-made female billionaires in India is Nayar. On November 10, 2021, Nykaa went public with a valuation of $13 billion. Nayar's net worth increased to $6.5 billion shortly after Nykaa went public, making her the richest woman in India and propelling her into the top 20 Indians by net worth.
Madhabi Puri Buch
Forbes reports that Puri Buch, the chair of Sebi, is charge of managing the $3 trillion Indian stock market ecosystem. Puri Buch served as managing director and CEO of ICICI Securities while serving as a consultant for the New Development Bank in Shanghai.
Madhabi Puri Buch is the chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, a securities regulating organisation. She is the first female chair of a non-IAS organisation like SEBI.
She and the former chairman Ajay Tyagi have worked together closely as a full-time member of SEBI since April 2017. Additionally, she is the first individual from the commercial sector to hold this post. Buch has been lauded with bringing about quick adjustments that were beneficial to the system and corporatizing the institution to increase efficiency in her capacity as SEBI chairwoman.
Roshni Nadar Malhotra
Forbes says "Malhotra as the chairman of HCLTech, an international provider of IT services and consulting with headquarters in India.She is in charge of making every strategic choice for the $12 billion technology corporation. She is ranked 53rd in the list."
As the chair of HCL Technologies and the first woman to head a publicly traded IT company in India, Roshni Nadar Malhotra (born in 1980 or 1981) is a billionaire businesswoman from India. She is the only child of HCL founder and wealthy businessman Shiv Nadar. In 2019, she was placed 54th on the Forbes list of the world's 100 most powerful women. In 2019, she was also named the richest woman in India. In 2020, she was ranked 55th. In addition, she serves as the CEO of HCL Corporation, the holding company for the whole HCL Group.
Soma Mondal
The CEO of the Maharatna PSU SAIL, Soma Mondal, was listed in Forbes' list of the 100 most powerful women. Forbes positioned her at number 67.
In January 2021, Soma Mondal became the first woman to serve as the chairman of the government-run Steel Authority of India (SAIL). Since assuming over, she has guided the steelmaker to unprecedented financial growth: in her first year in charge, the company's profits tripled to 120 billion rupees.
In 2017, Mondal was appointed to the board for the first time. She is in charge of starting an 80,000 million rupee production capacity expansion project. She has worked in the metals sector for more than three decades. She joined the state-run National Aluminium Co. after earning a degree in electrical engineering from college.
