Business Today

There are numerous studies which show that having more women in the workplaces is good for business not because it is the politically correct thing to do in today's era, but because it is better for the bottom line. Two years ago, a study by EY and

Fourteen year old Avni Deshmukh and her 16 year old sibling Sara alternately do a post a day on Instagram, featuring the latest in make up trends and commenting on the new and the fun colours that are out. If you think it is a bit too early in the da

Q. The biggest challenge you faced in your career A. Setting up a financial shared service centre for a large multinational. I had no previous experience, and it required me to relocate my family to another state, and it challenged me to lead, inspir

The Reserve Bank of India annual report says that 99.3 per cent of the high value notes that were demonetised have come back. It also says that people have started keeping their savings in cash again. Meanwhile, the introduction of new currency notes

Radha (name changed), 39, is a Senior Partner at an investment banking firm where she has been working for seven years. She was rising swiftly, managing important clients, cracking multi million dollar deals. Since last year, when she became a mother

How do you see the trade war playing out? A: Dr. Ira Kalish: There is a high degree of uncertainty about it. It's not clear how far we'll go and what the specific causes will be. There's evidence that businesses in the US and Europe are putting inves

The crippled Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS), which made headlines earlier this month for defaulting on a Rs 1,000 crore loan from Small Industries Development Bank of India (Sidbi), is now looking to sell off assets to honour its

This year's Galaxy Note is not about innovation but perfection. Besides the best in class display, fine build quality and great performance, what makes the Galaxy Note9 special is its S Pen stylus that Samsung has enhanced over the years. But its new

The Mahabharata happened due to envy, says eminent Odia environmentalist Radhamohan to this writer at his home in Odisha. "Awards and recognition are a burden. It turns friends into enemies," he says. It is with such upbringing that Sabarmatee got fr

Wearables are always focussed on activity and fitness for want of something better to do. The ability to track in real time has opened up new opportunities for companies to tack on features based on the data from smartwatches, rings and even earbuds.

In this era of invasive tech, kids get to interact with gadgets galore at a very young age, can navigate most of them (especially the handy ones like smartphones or tablets) and also learn to surf and download. Gadgets are great learning tools, but t

If data is integral to the financial world in decision making, why can't it be of use to the social world? To find out, Prukalpa Sankar, Founder, SocialCops, moved to India from Singapore with Co founder Varun Banka and kicked off data research in In

The understated headquarters of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan located in a nondescript lane of a Mumbai suburb host numerous workshops for the socially backward, lower income Muslim women. Its Founder, Noorjehan Safia Niaz, has a single point agend

If you are a woman aged between 20 and 40, and experiencing specific syndromes such as severe acne, dark skin patches, excessive hair growth on face or stomach, weight gain or irregular/no periods, these could be warning signs. You need to see your d

Rweeta Basu, 50, had never been a writer but now she has seven books and a film script to her credit besides being a theatre artiste and a social worker. It all started when the former homemaker attended creative writing workshops organised by the Ko

Are you a woman in the field of technology, feeling stuck or pressured and contemplating to give up? A male manager asked to diversify the workforce or one with many women on your team or the mentor of a bright woman who will be just another statisti

A couple of years ago, when 50 year old Vibha Padalkar was holidaying in Barcelona, she was fascinated by flamenco dancing at Theatre City Hall. "The music sounded so Indian," she says. Curiosity led her to dig more. She found that there were Indian

Many in the financial inclusion space look up to her as the "mother of Indian microfinance". Vijayalakshmi Das, 66, was after all involved in handholding some of the biggest names in Indian microfinance in their initial days, be it SKS Microfinance (

This September end, the 60 year old Usha Sangwan, Managing Director of LIC, will hang up her boots after a career spanning almost four decades. Sangwan, who was one of the top contenders for the post of chairman almost two years ago, had joined as a

Triple Talaq petitioner Shayara Bano will continue her campaign against regressive practices. Bano, 36, was dealt a severe blow, when her husband of 13 years, divorced her through Speed Post. He cited mental imbalance as the reason for divorcing her

Shweta Jalan, Managing Director, Advent India PE Advisors, is in the middle of closing a large deal. She is also readying for a profitable exit from a portfolio company. This isn't new for a 42 year old Jalan, who had earlier honed her skills at ICIC

In the closing months OF 2008, Surga Thilakan was involved with a $8 billion structured loan for a client at Goldman Sachs in the US. Shortly thereafter, she was in Bangalore at Ujjivan Financial Services, this time involved with a Rs 8,000 loan to

Sumita Ghose is well set on her journey to make RangSutra the 'Amul' for handloom and handicraft products. After all, she has founded the only Indian producer owned company in the handicraft space. The inspiration was her work with Urmul Trust in wes

Priya Nair, Executive Director (Homecare), of Hindustan Unilever, firmly believes that premium products are not only for consumers in metro cities. Nair proved this with 'premium' homecare products such as Comfort Conditioner and Surf Excel liquid de

A talk on the sad state of female hygiene in India, in 2012, by Magsaysay Award winner and Founder of the NGO Goonj, Anshu Gupta, changed the life of Suhani Mohan. Till then, for the 28 year old Mohan, the idea of giving back to society was limited t

Aruna Sundararajan is behind the key decisions that will set the agenda for the telecom sector for years to come. When Aruna Sundararajan took full charge as the telecom secretary in June last year, the sector was going through a critical phase con

Around 57 per cent of 14 18 year olds could not solve a basic division problem. Forty seven per cent of them couldn't read a simple sentence in English. These figures from ASER (Annual Status of Education Report, 2017) hold up a mirror to India's sta

Alice Vaidyan, 59, is a compulsive reader. Incidentally, she has laid her hands on Skin In The Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, which talks about embracing uncertainty rather than trying to predict everything. In Skin In T

As Ratnaboli Ray enters the male ward of the mental institution at Pavlov Hospital, a man in his 40s comes to greet her, radiant with his new purchase a gold earring. It might be a small item, but for someone who was once an inmate at the instituti

Convincing her parents about her decision to quit her seven figure salary job at McKinsey India and take the start up route wasn't easy for Priyanka Agarwal. It was even tougher to convince investors that she was committed to the task. In the initial

Almost everyone in Maharashtra's Gadhchiroli district would know where Bangubais dawakhana is. The Maa Danteshwari Dawakhana in Dhanora (Gadhchiroli) is a landmark in this naxal infested area, and Gangubai is none other than Dr. Rani Bang, a Padmashr

Ariver cuts through rock not because of its power but persistence." The , by author James Watkins, best describes the management mantra of Zarin Daruwala, who heads one of the largest foreign banks in India. Persistence and perseverance have been the

Few outside the Indian microfinance world know that Praseeda Kunam and her husband, Balachander Krishnamurthy, an IITian and University of Chicago alumnus, played a crucial role in the early years of SKS Microfinance, which went on to become a behem

Vanaja Sarna was a member of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) earlier called the Central Board of Excise and Customs for two years. The then chairperson, Najib Shah, was to retire on March 31, 2017, just ahead of the schedul

Paanchvi pass and married off at the age of 10 these are not the ideal living conditions for anyone to thrive. But that has not deterred Phoolbasan Bai Yadav from leading tens of thousands of women in their fight against poverty and gender bias. Sh

Few people outside the corporate hospital circles know that when Dr Prathap C. Reddy set up Apollo's first hospital in Chennai in 1983, it was his daughter Shobana who sat with Indian architects and translated the brief from doctors into the design o

A sabbatical for Latika Thukral (then senior vice president at Citibank) to spend more time with her two sons made her realise that she did not want to go back to her fast paced corporate career. The time off also led her to reflect on how Gurgaon wa

Aveteran in the insurance domain with three decades of experience, RM Vishakha joined IndiaFirst in 2015 (it is her second stint in the company) as MD and CEO, but the challenges were many as the company was still struggling to establish its identity

There has been a steady rise of women up the corporate ladder. We at Business Today know that very well, since we were the first publication to highlight the achievements of women in Indian business starting 2003. Last year, we widened the scope to i

As the CEO and President of National e governance division, Radha Chauhan, a Uttar Pradesh cadre IAS officer, got a challenging assignment in 2016. She was asked to find out whether an Amazon like e marketplace could replace the traditional governmen

Indu Malhotra's appointment as a Supreme Court judge was fraught with controversy as the government had earlier refused to elevate Uttarakhand High Court Chief Justice K.M. Joseph and promoted her instead. However, no amount of controversy could take

Prathiba Singh's journey from a top IPR lawyer to a Permanent Judge in the Delhi High Court is full of milestones. She was a member of the IPR Think Tank which drafted India's National IPR Policy in 2015, member of the committee to amend the Copyrigh

Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM, plotted her career well. Ever since she was a young marketing executive at Intel, Ghosh wanted to head the company's India operations. Every career decision she took thereafter was taken with this goal in mind. In 2

One of the leading ladies in intellectual property rights in India, Pallavi Shroff, has made it to the Business Today Most Powerful Women list for the sixth time. The jury specifically noted Shroff's contribution to the path breaking case of Bharat M

When Neeru Chadha was elected to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) last year, she became only the second woman to be appointed as a judge. Hamburg based ITLOS is an independent judicial body under the United Nations Convention

Nadia Chauhan, Joint Managing Director of Parle Agro, has been her father Prakash's biggest critic since her childhood. Prakash created the iconic beverages Thums Up, Gold Spot and Limca, first sought her feedback whenever they were experimenting wit

At some point of time, you are bound to have used products of 3M India be it office stationery products like Post it and glue stick to home care product such as the Scotch Brite scrub sponge. 3M has kept pace in tune with the India growth story aft

If you are heading the country's largest ratings agency, you have a good understanding of the pulse of the economy. Ashu Suyash, MD & CEO of CRISIL Ltd, an assignment she got three years ago, doesn't shy away from expressing her views on risks the In

Although the Indian IT industry is three decades old, there are only a handful of Indian women in global roles. Aruna Jayanthi, the former India boss of European IT services giant Capgemini, is one of them. After running just India operations, Jayant

Ameera Shah, Promoter and Managing Director, Metropolis Healthcare, worked as a CEO, accountant, sales person and even as a receptionist when she got on with turning around her father's laboratory from Dr Sushil Shah's Laboratory to Metropolis Health

For Aarthi Subramanian, who was elevated as Chief Digital Officer (CDO) of Tata Sons a year back, work dynamics have changed a lot but not the work environment. In her earlier profile at TCS, where she was global head of delivery excellence, governan