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Isha Ambani, daughter of Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Radhika Piramal, daughter of VIP Industries Chairman Dilip Piramal, have been named by Forbes magazine among its 12 “power businesswomen” from Asia this year.
Isha, 23, is a director at Reliance Jio Infocomm and Reliance Retail Ventures, while Piramal is the managing director (MD) of VIP Industries.
The report also named Akhila Srinivasan, managing director/non-executive director, Shriram Life Insurance/Shriram Capital; Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairman, State Bank of India; Chanda Kochhar, managing director and CEO, ICICI Bank; Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, founder and chairman & managing director, Biocon; Shikha Sharma, CEO, Axis Bank; and Usha Sangwan, MD of Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC); as Asia’s Power Women of 2015.
Isha, who graduated from Yale University with double majors in psychology and South Asian studies in 2013, had in April 2014 joined McKinsey & Company’s New York office as a business analyst. She was inducted on the board of Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail in October last year, along with brother Akash.
Piramal, 36, is credited with reviving VIP Industries following an onslaught by multinationals. Forbes has named 12 “savvy, ambitious women, some of whom are well on their way to forging stellar reputations in their industries, others still in apprenticeship but learning fast” in its 2015 list of Asia’s Power Businesswomen to watch out for.
Radhika Piramal
The list also includes Ameera Shah, 35, MD and CEO at Metropolis Healthcare, and Samina Vaziralli, 39, head of strategic projects at pharmaceutical major Cipla.
Another big surprise was Sangwan of LIC. According to Forbes, Sangwan made history when she was appointed managing director of LIC. She is the first woman to occupy the post, and is one of the three managing directors at the government-owned insurer, India’s largest. LIC has 250 million customers, assets of $287 billion and more than 1.1 million agents. Sangwan is the daughter of tractor tycoon Lachhman Das Mittal, who features among India’s richest. She studied economics at Panjab University, and joined LIC in 1981 as a direct-recruit officer and worked her way up; and she was promoted as its MD two years ago.
On Akhila Srinivasan, MD of Shriram Life Insurance, Forbes said in less than a decade Srinivasan catapulted Shriram Life Insurance to one among the top five private players in the industry in India in terms of profitability.
“It went on a hiring spree last year, increasing the number of employees to 9,000 from 5,500. Total premiums collected surged almost 17-fold in seven years to $695 million,” the magazine said.
