BT BIG STORY: From ideas to industry leaders, how women are powering India’s new age businesses

The numbers corroborate the shift in women’s participation in management. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s Women and Men in India 2025: Selected Indicators and Data, released in April, said the number of women in managerial positions rose 102.54% between 2017 and 2025, compared with a 73.80% increase for men.

What does it take to build a business in a new or fast-changing industry, and what role do women leaders play in helping it grow beyond its early promise? It’s not simply about entering male-dominated sectors or occupying senior positions. It is also about building teams, establishing processes, taking difficult decisions and creating organisations that can function at scale.

The Work Behind Scale

When Anjali Sardana decided to build a home-services business in India, she was stepping into unfamiliar territory. Raised in the US, she had limited exposure to the country’s informal labour markets and no experience of running operations on the ground. The doubts were obvious, including from her own family. But the founder of Pronto chose to start anyway.

“If you were prepared, you probably wouldn’t do it,” she tells Business Today, reflecting on the leap into a business that seeks to organise the market for household services.

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Pronto’s proposition extends beyond matching customers with workers. It seeks to formalise a largely informal workforce, create more predictable earning opportunities, improve working conditions, and build systems that can support a much larger operation. She sees India’s large workforce as an opportunity to develop capabilities around AI and robotics in the physical world. The challenge is to translate that vision into reliable service delivery, effective worker support and repeatable operations.

Thousands of kilometres away, in Chennai, almost over a decade ago, Rekha Murthy Rangarajan, Whole-time Director at Data Patterns, a vertically integrated defence and aerospace electronics solutions provider, was making a very different bet. In 2002, she left a rewarding corporate career to join Data Patterns, founded by her husband Srinivasagopalan Rangarajan. The business had about 45 employees. Her brief was to build human resource, recruitment, training and administrative functions.

Over time, she also took responsibility for processes at the company’s manufacturing facility. Today, Data Patterns has a workforce of around 1,700 and has grown from building electronic subsystems to larger systems for defence and aerospace applications, says Rangarajan.

Their industries, career paths and starting points could hardly be more different. Yet, Sardana and Rangarajan faced a common challenge—turning a business opportunity into an organisation capable of delivering at scale.

That challenge also runs through the experiences of Rithika Mohan, co-founder and chief administrative officer of drone company Garuda Aerospace, and Shilpa Choudari of defence-technology company Zen Technologies, whose career evolved from research and marketing support into finance and operations.

Their journeys offer a view of leadership that goes beyond the familiar founder narrative. In businesses shaped by technological uncertainty, demanding customers and the need to scale, developing teams, establishing processes, allocating responsibility and making difficult decisions can be as consequential as the original innovation.

From this to that

Rangarajan joined Data Patterns when the company was small enough for many functions to be handled informally. Recruitment, training and administration had to become more structured as the business expanded into increasingly complex electronics. She drew on her experience across psychology, journalism, corporate communications and human resources, including her stint at Polaris Software. The priority was to build practices that employees could understand and own rather than impose procedures to just satisfy external requirements.

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The approach to quality certification reflected that philosophy. Teams worked together to document processes, establish checklists and follow procedures before pursuing the relevant certification requirements. “We have to institutionalise whatever we are doing,” says Rangarajan.

Processes were not paperwork added after growth but part of the intellectual property that allowed the organisation to grow without depending entirely on individual employees, she says. Her responsibilities expanded to include planning and construction of the company’s manufacturing facility. That gave her a close understanding of production workflow, equipment and infrastructure needed to build electronic systems. It was also her induction into technology.

At Zen Technologies, too, Choudari’s path into leadership was gradual. She started out as a research fellow supporting marketing, moved into marketing and tender-related work, and later took on finance and operations responsibilities. She grew by taking up unfamiliar responsibilities. “I can do much more than what I believe,” she says, describing what she learnt as she started meeting people, questioning decisions and expanding her remit. Her current responsibilities connect commercial discipline with execution.

In a business where orders can involve complex defence systems and long delivery cycles, winning work is only one part of the task. The company must also execute orders while protecting margins. Choudari says Zen does not want to take business at a loss. For both women, leadership has meant moving beyond a functional job description and understanding how different parts of a business fit together and ensuring that decisions translate into execution.

Building the Institutional Muscle

For Garuda Aerospace’s Mohan, the challenge was to transition from start-up to scale-up. If an employee’s absence or departure causes a task to stall, the organisation has not yet built a sufficiently robust system. Her response was to create processes that make people less dependent on managers while remaining accountable for outcomes. The objective is not to eliminate initiative. It is to build an organisation where initiative can flourish without every decision needing the founder’s intervention. “One thing I’ve learnt is that you cannot wait for someone to give you authority. You have to own it,” says Mohan.

This has particular significance in aerospace and defence, sectors where technical expertise and established hierarchies can make it harder for a woman leader to be taken seriously. Mohan says she prepares, asks questions and examines details rather than assuming that authority will automatically follow her designation. Her ambition is institutional. She wants Garuda to become less dependent on any one person, including herself. That requires clarifying responsibilities, building accountability and giving teams room to make decisions.

At Pronto, Sardana’s challenge is different. The business is trying to formalise services delivered through a largely informal workforce. Her ambition reaches beyond household services to other physical-work sectors, including warehouses, factories, manufacturing and retail. She sees India’s large workforce as an opportunity to develop capabilities around AI and robotics in the physical world.

Her willingness to enter a market she did not fully understand is central to her story. But conviction alone cannot sustain a business. As the company grows, the task is to translate that conviction into reliable service delivery, effective worker support and repeatable operations.

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Authority, Credibility

Not all of these leaders describe gender as defining their careers. Their experiences, however, reveal different ways in which women negotiate authority.

Rangarajan says she did not want to rely on being the managing director’s wife or a board member to establish her place at Data Patterns. She had to build credibility with employees who had worked alongside her husband from the early years of the company. Her approach was to work with them, take responsibility and demonstrate what needed to change. She also articulates a broader concern about professional advancement: “Men are always recruited for potential. Women have to prove it. Women are recruited with proof.”

Rangarajan ’s experience suggests credibility can be built through performance, but it also raises the question of why women may have to demonstrate readiness so visibly in the first place.

Mohan makes a related point about the need to claim authority rather than waiting for it to be conferred. She rejects the tendency to praise women primarily for managing people or keeping operations running smoothly. “I don’t want to be known as a woman who manages things well. I want to be known as a leader who builds things well,” she says.

The distinction matters in sectors where women leaders can be associated with support functions even when their remit includes decisions central to business performance. Building the business, in this view, means being recognised for strategy, execution and results, not just the ability to coordinate people.

At Zen, Choudari’s account is less about confronting gender directly than expanding her own sense of what she can do. She describes herself as an introvert who did not initially imagine she would occupy a senior role. Her growing confidence came through experience, exposure and responsibility.

The four accounts do not suggest one universal model of women’s leadership. They show women arriving at authority through different routes—founding a company, taking on operational responsibilities, progressing across functions, and building organisational systems.

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Progress, Not Complete

The wider data points to movement in women’s participation in management, alongside persistent gaps in the conditions that help them advance. The numbers indicate faster growth in managerial participation. They do not, by themselves, establish that women now hold an equal share of management roles.

The AIMA–KPMG report, Women Leadership in Corporate India 2026, based on insights from more than 200 professionals, highlights the gap between progress in representation and the experience of advancement. It finds that 55% of employees surveyed acknowledge having a defined process for assessing candidates for leadership roles, but only 28% believe that the evaluation process is genuinely fair and transparent. It also identifies work-life pressures, burnout, caregiving responsibilities and uneven access to leadership opportunities as factors shaping women’s career trajectories.

These findings matter because a growing number of women entering management does not automatically mean they have equal access to high-impact assignments, decision-making authority or opportunities needed to progress into senior leadership. Nor does representation alone tell us whether organisations are equipped to retain and develop that talent.

The leaders’ accounts bring these institutional questions into focus. Rangarajan’s emphasis on process and employee ownership, Choudari’s evolution into a broader operational role, Mohan’s focus on autonomy and accountability, and Sardana’s attempt to formalise an informal market all point to the organisational work that accompanies growth. Their approaches are not identical. Neither should their experiences be flattened into a single narrative about women overcoming barriers. They are business stories about how organisations grow, professionalise and prepare for more complex demands.

The emerging industries these women operate in may be defined by drones, defence electronics, advanced systems or new service models. But beneath the technology is a more enduring task, building companies that can execute consistently, learn as they expand, and function beyond the instincts or energy of any single leader.

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