Chitra Ramkrishna
47, Joint Managing Director, NSE
(Number of times in BT's Most Powerful list: 3)

Biggest achievement in 2010: Taking NSE into overseas markets Being a powerful woman is important because: It helps you take the right decisions and helps you to empower others Tip for work-life balance: Good time management A workplace without women is: Difficult to imagine

The year 2010 has been a year of outreach for the National Stock Exchange, or NSE, the country's largest equities market. Through recent tie-ups with Chicago-based CME Group and the Singapore Exchange, the NSE is going one-up on upstarts like MCX-SX.

Chitra Ramkrishna, unarguably India's most powerful woman in the lucrative exchanges space, shrugs off the competition as inevitable. "Competition is an integral part of the evolution of any industry and in the same vein we take it in our stride," says Ramkrishna who, last September, was elevated to Joint MD from Deputy MD at the NSE.

-T.V.Mahalingam

The 30 Most Powerful Women
1. Schauna Chauhan 2. Zarin Daruwala 3. Lynn de Souza 4. Tanya Dubash 5. Shyamala Gopinath 6. Vinita Gupta 7. Kaku Nakhate 8. Vedika Bhandarkar 9. Manisha Girotra 10. Lalita Gupte 11. Usha Narayanan 12. Akhila Srinivasan 13. Leena Nair 14. Vinita Bali 15. Chanda Kochhar	16. Roopa Kudva 17. Naina Lal Kidwai 18. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw 19. Zarina Mehta 20. Zia Mody 21. Kalpana Morparia 22. Vishakha Mulye 23. Swati Piramal 24. Meher Pudumjee 25. Madhabi Puri Buch 26. Chitra Ramkrishna 27. Preetha Reddy 28. Shikha Sharma 29. Mallika Srinivasan 30. Sangeeta Talwar