Business Today 21 December 2025

For the first time, BT has based its Most Powerful Women in Business listing on a single measure: profitability. Just as the BT500 now ranks India’s largest companies by profit, this year’s MPW list follows the same principle and uses profit to identify women leaders who deliver returns. That is why we say: profit is power. To build the Most Powerful Women in Business 2025 list, the BT Research team relied on a universe of 5,000 listed firms. From this, we selected companies that reported a consolidated profit after tax of at least ₹100 crore in FY25. We then examined the top leadership of these companies. The outcome is a first-ever listing of 100 women business leaders at the helm of profitable enterprises across sectors. The full universe of profit-making…

DIRECTORSHIPS RISING WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION ON THE BOARDS OF NSE-LISTED COMPANIES HAS IMPROVED STEADILY. DIRECTORSHIPS HELD BY WOMEN HAVE RISEN FROM 13.6% IN FY16 TO 21.4% IN FY25 NOTE VALUE IN % SOURCE PRIMEINFOBASE.COM PURSUING PROFIT THE PROFITABILITY OF THE TOP 20 WOMEN-LED COMPANIES HAS SURGED SHARPLY IN RECENT YEARS NOTE PAT IN ₹ '000 CRORE SOURCE ACE EQUITY POWER PACKED AMONG FIRMS LED BY WOMEN, IN FIVE YEARS, POWER FINANCE CORPORATION (PFC) RECORDED OVER 200% GROWTH IN PROFIT NOTE PAT IN ₹CRORE SOURCE ACE EQUITY 4,411 NUMBER OF WOMEN DIRECTORS AS OF OCTOBER 2025 IN 2,753 NSE LISTED FIRMS, UP FROM 1,601 IN FY16, ACCORDING TO PRIME INFOBASE ₹27.07 LAKH CRORE THE COMBINED MARKET CAPITALISATION OF THE TOP 20 MOST PROFITABLE WOMEN-LED COMPANIES AS ON NOVEMBER 19, 2025 16 NUMBER OF…

AHEAD OF HIS VISIT to India on December 4 and 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia and India have laid out an ambitious plan for our collaboration in key domains. Russia’s partnership with India encompasses such fields as space exploration, energy, shipbuilding, and aviation and there are many interesting areas for cooperation in the future such as artificial intelligence. In an interview with the India Today Group’s Anjana Om Kashyap and Geeta Mohan, President Putin also spoke about the need to make better use of the BRICS New Development Bank’s opportunities. Edited excerpts: GM: There’s immense pressure on India and Russia when it comes to oil. How can both countries handle this Western pressure? The pressure you have referred to typically involves employing political instruments to influence normal competition.…

AMTEK AUTO LTD, once among India’s leading automotive component manufacturers, began as a rising auto-components manufacturer. It then embarked on an aggressive acquisition spree overseas (including UK), often financed via large borrowings rather than internalaccruals. Thedebtmounted rapidly: one report notes borrowing rose from around ₹3,800 crore to about ₹14,200 crore within a few years, and eventually much more. Amtek became synonymous with corporate distress when it landed in the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) “Dirty Dozen” list in 2017. This list named 12 large corporate defaulters that were to be pushed into insolvency proceedings under the newly implemented Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). The inclusion of Amtek Auto reflected not just the company’s financial collapse but also the systemic failures of India’s banking and industrial lending practices. At its peak, Amtek…

WHAT DEFINES A powerful woman? Is it perception? Is it regular appearances in media? Or is it defined by her position as a businesswoman, corporate professional, or influential policymaker? Can there be an objective metric to identify India’s most powerful women in business? At Business Today, we grappled with these questions before we decided we could rely on data to identify women who truly wield power in business. Et voilà! That’s how we compiled the Most Powerful Women in Business 2025 list. This is not the first time we have pivoted towards data in recent times. A couple of months ago, we used the profitability metric to identify top-performing listed companies in the BT500 issue. We are using the same profitability metric to identify the most powerful women in the…

Roshni Nadar Malhotra was working as a producer with Sky News in London after completing her undergrad in film and television when her father—Shiv Nadar, the founder of HCL Technologies, India’s third-largest IT firm—told her to do “something normal.” “We laughed about it. I asked what is normal?” she tells Business Today. Shiv Nadar, a self-made billionaire who had never been to a B-School himself, advised her to join one. That changed the course of Malhotra’s career. After MBA from Kellogg School of Management, she joined the HCL Group in 2008. In 2013, she got inducted on the board of HCLTech, becoming the Chairperson in 2020. She is ranked second on BT’s Most Powerful Women in Business list. Earlier this year, she was declared the richest woman in India by…