BT's Most Powerful Women in Business awards: Celebrating success

The stars came out early on a Friday evening in March as Business Today celebrated the success and achievements of The Most Powerful Women in Business, with a host of women leaders at St. Regis Mumbai.

Kicking off the evening’s proceedings was an agenda-setting discussion on ‘Leadership’s Female Quotient’, helmed by Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor of Harvard Business School. Following it were several interesting discussions featuring Zia Mody, Co–founder and Managing Partner at AZB & Partners; Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India; Swati Piramal, Vice Chairperson of Piramal Group; and Nandita Das, Film-maker and Actor, among other eminent personalities from the fields of business, sports and entertainment, who held forth on the challenges faced by women at work and the ways to overcome them.

Mamaearth Co-founder Ghazal Alagh; Sangita Reddy, Joint MD of Apollo Hospitals; HCL’s Roshni Nadar Malhotra; and SUGAR Cosmetics Co-founder and CEO Vineeta Singh were among the achievers honoured at the recent event to celebrate the 19th edition of BT MPW. The awards were given away by Union Minister Smriti Irani.

The list of 55 trailblazing women winners represented both continuity and change as the evening saw nine debutantes, 31 repeat winners from last year and seven comebacks from earlier years, from fields as varied as textiles, pharma, entertainment, start-ups, finance and manufacturing, among others, take home the award.

Three women—Nita Ambani of Reliance Foundation, Kaku Nakhate of Bank of America and Priya Nair of Unilever—who are seven-time winners of the award, entered BT’s prestigious MPW Hall of Fame, making way for newer entrants in the coming year.

A highlight of the evening was the talk by actor-turned-politician Irani, Union Minister of Women & Child Development and Minister of Minority Affairs, on ‘Leveraging India’s Better Half for Economic & Social Growth’.

The evening also saw Indian cricketers Jemimah Rodrigues and Harleen Deol break into a song at the end of their session called ‘Trailblazers: Cricket’s New Icons’; the panel also included former Indian cricketers Jhulan Goswami and Hrishikesh Kanitkar—who is also their coach.

Started in 2003, Business Today was the first magazine to champion this glittering annual list of star women achievers in India. And here’s hoping that the coming years will see an even more diverse set of women grace the list.