The Top 5 Women Executives of India - Building Gender Balanced Business

• MSN of India has picked its top five businesswomen of India — even if the top-ranked executive doesn’t live or work in India.

• The MSN profiles of the top five women are thin, little more than listings of their jobs and hometowns. But the pride in these women shines through even if their merits are given the shortest of writeups.

• No. 1 is Indra Krishnamoorthi Nooyi, president and CEO of PepsiCo. “Nooyi is at present the highest ranking female corporate personality of Indian origin in the United States.” No surprise there, as she was listed as the No. 1 businesswoman in the world in 2006 by Forbes magazine.

• No. 2 is Naina Lal Kidwai, India CEO of HSBC. She is quoted as saying she has no plans to leave India for greener pastures. “In the US, I may have brokered bigger deals, but here, I am at the cutting edge of reform.”

• No. 3 is Preetha Reddy, managing director of the leading Indian health-care company Apollo Hospitals, which was founded by her father. “I do not have any management degrees,” she says. “All my learning came from the workplace.”

• No. 4 is Chanda Kochhar, the incoming managing director of ICICI Bank. A 24-year veteran of the bank, she was named “Business Woman of the Year” by The Economic Times in 2005.

• Finally, there is Kalpana Morparia, head of JPMorgan’s operations in India and soon to be on JPMorgan’s Asia-Pacific executive committee. She was a major player in the ICICI joint venture that made the entity into the second-largest Indian bank.

The MSN article