Roshni Nadar: Ten Facts About One Of India's Richest Women

Roshni Nadar Malhotra, chairwoman of HCL Technologies, has maintained her spot as one of the richest women in India, with a 54% increase in her net worth to 84,330 crores in 2021. For over three consecutive years, Roshni Nadar Malhotra has taken first place on the list of richest Indian women. She is also the first Indian woman to be in charge of a listed IT company. 

Nadar took over HCL Technologies in July 2020 after her father, Shiv Nadar who founded the organisation, retired. 

Roshni Nadar: Facts To Know About Her

• Roshni Nadar Malhotra was listed as the world's 60th Most Powerful Woman in Forbes' annual list in 2023.
• Roshni Nadar Malhotra is one of the few female chairpersons in the male-dominated technology sector and the first woman to lead a listed tech company in India. She was titled with the first rank in the list of Richest Indian Women with a net worth of close to Rs 85,000 crores.
• Reportedly, Nadar wasn't really fond of technology at first. She worked as a TV news producer for Sky News in the UK after earning her undergraduate degree in radio, television, and film from Northwestern University in 2003. She returned to the United States three years later to complete an M.B.A. in social enterprise at her alma university.
• After moving back home in 2008, Nadar Malhotra was named CEO of HCL Corp., the holding firm through which the Nadars held their shares in the publicly traded HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. At the time, the HCL group, along with Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro, was one of India's leading technology corporations. These businesses were responsible for producing tech millionaires like Azim Premji and N.R. Narayana Murthy.
• From her father, Malhotra took up the position of chairperson of HCL in July 2020.
• She is in charge of making strategic calls for the multi-billion technology corporation. HCL, which her father Shiv Nadar founded in 1976, played a significant role in India's development into a global IT hub.
• She reportedly first refrained from any position at the company's flagship HCL Technologies. She spent the first year of her tenure managing the educational programmes of the Shiv Nadar Foundation, the family's charitable organisation.
• Under this Foundation, she established two fully-funded boarding schools for underprivileged rural students in Uttar Pradesh state, where HCL is centred, as per reports.
• Nadar Malhotra joined the HCL Technologies board in 2013 and was promoted to vice chairperson five years later. She claims that those jobs gave her "great exposure" to her father, the company's working environment, and its top talent, including previous and current CEOs.
• She has also benefited from the knowledge of board members including S. Shankar Sastry, a former dean of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior associate dean at Harvard Business School Srikant Datar.
• She founded and also serves as a trustee of The Habitats Trust, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to preserving native species and their habitats.