A look at 10 of India's most powerful women in business

Aruna Sundararajan is behind the key decisions that will set the agenda for the telecom sector for years to come. She took full charge as India's Telecom Secretary and Chairman of the Telecom Commission. A 1982 batch IAS officer from Kerala Cadre, Ms Sundararajan, is one of the most senior civil servants of the Indian Administrative Service in the country. For a bureaucrat with a career spanning around 36 years, she says the current job has been the most challenging for her. Sundararajan has a lot on her plate. She has to improve the quality of services - a persistent problem - and make India a winner in the 5G sweepstakes. Sundararajan says that the roadmap to develop 5G capabilities in the country is evolving quite well.

Vani Kola is among the few Indian women who have been able to reach the top in the male-dominated venture capital, or VC, industry. In the US, for instance, only 6 percent women are VCs. The numbers in India are minuscule. Some of her successful exits have been Myntra when it was acquired by Flipkart for $330 million, Urban Ladder, BlueStone, and Zivame, among others. The Managing Director of Kalaari Capital, one of India's leading early-stage venture capital firms leads a busy life. After raising a venture fund in the US, she moved to Bangalore, India, but travels extensively across the country and is actively engaged with startups.

Zarin Daruwala, CEO, India, Standard Chartered Bank is well on the path of de-risking the business model of one of the largest foreign banks in India. The 53-year-old Daruwala has single-mindedly focused on de-risking the business by increasing the share of retail advances, improving the share of current accounts savings accounts (CASA) in total deposits, arresting the deterioration in asset quality, focusing on recovery and underwriting quality corporate banking business.She was named as the fourteenth most powerful woman in business by Fortune in 2016 and was selected as one of the top 30 most powerful women in Indian business by

Rukmini Banerji, CEO, Pratham, is behind the ASER (Annual Status of Education Report, 2017) initiative, which has been revealing the status of India's elementary education since 2005. She was responsible for Pratham's programs and activities in several major states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and was also the Director of ASER Centre (the research and assessment unit of Pratham). ASER holds up a mirror to India's status of elementary schooling and basic learning. Pratham's ASER has helped identify learning gaps among primary schoolchildren. ASER's findings might not be encouraging, but Banerji is optimistic

Suhani Mohan is taking sanitary pads to women at large and making them aware of menstrual hygiene. She is the founder of Saral Designs, a sanitary pads company. It's a start-up providing access to quality affordable menstrual hygiene products to low-income women in India. The Rs 1.6-crore start-up is a 'for-profit' social enterprise. Apart from selling Active pads through the network of women from the community, over 60 percent of sales are through NGOs, which buys in bulk. Mohan also holds three years of investment banking experience at Deutsche Bank

Shobana Kamineni is the Executive Vice Chairperson of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Limited and a member of its founding family. Apollo Hospitals is the pioneer of private healthcare in India and is Asia's foremost integrated healthcare conglomerate. She has been the key force behind growth in the pharmacy and insurance business for Apollo. As lead Director in Apollo's research and innovation activities, Shobana championed the creation and Incubation of a Biobank - a catalogued library of ethically consented, anonymised bio-samples. The Biobank was recognized as one of the top 10 ideas in Life Sciences by the Time Magazine for the decade.An active member of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Shobana's appointment as its president in 2017- 18 created history as she was the first ever woman to hold the position since its inception in 1895.

Nadia Chauhan, JMD & CMO of Parle Agro, has been her father Prakash's biggest critic since her childhood. Prakash created the iconic beverages Thums Up, Gold Spot and Limca, first seeking her feedback whenever they were experimenting with a new product. Therefore, joining her father's business was a natural choice. When she joined the group in 2003, she was in charge of marketing and innovations. But the one thing that constantly bothered her was that the company was not growing according to its potential. Chauhan's efforts have paid off. Parle Agro beverages Frooti and Appy are now available in two million stores across the country. Its brands have the second highest market share after Coca-Cola's Maaza.

Nisaba Godrej, the Executive Chairperson of the Rs 10,000 crore Godrej Consumer Products, has been trying hard to change the over-100-year-old conglomerate's old-economy image to a contemporary and vibrant one whose products appeal to the millennials. And she is not doing it by launching new variants of the soap that her company has been making since 1918. Her new-age brands, and people policies are transforming the company. Be it creme-based hair colours, a wide range of salon hair products under the B-Blunt brand or the Goodknight Fabric Roll-on, Nisaba has ensured that her brands would resonate with the current generation. But brand innovation is just one part of the transformation story. Nisaba is also ushering in a huge culture change by attracting young talent. Working as the HR head of Godrej Industries since 2009, she has been pitching her non-hierarchical set-up that enables quick business decisions and faster growth opportunities - a stark contrast to the existing MNC culture of top-down format and global diktats

Prathiba Singh, who became Permanent Judge of Delhi HC in May 2017, has contributed to some of the most important IPR laws and given landmark judgments. Prathiba Singh's journey from a top IPR lawyer to a Permanent Judge in the Delhi High Court is full of milestones. She was a member of the IPR Think Tank which drafted India's National IPR Policy in 2015, member of the committee to amend the Copyright Act in 2012 and member of the Parliamentary Committee to amend the Patent Act in 2002. Justice Singh earned her spurs as IPR lawyer and managing partner at law firm 'Singh & Singh' fighting some tricky cases. The most notable was being on the winning side with Cipla against innovator Novartis for Cipla's right to produce a generic version of Novartis's Glivec in India and sell it at one-tenth the price.

Pallavi Shroff, Managing Partner, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, is one of the leading ladies in intellectual property rights in India. She has made it to the Business Today Most Powerful Women list for the sixth time. Shroff's contribution to the path-breaking case of Bharat Matrimony vs Google, where the regulator - Competition Commission of India - held Google guilty of 'search bias' and fined it $21.17 million is noteworthy. The other major recent win for Shroff - who happens to be Justice P.N. Bhagwati's daughter - was while representing ONGC vs Reliance before the AP Shah Committee in a case related to alleged theft of gas.