Forbes India W-Power: Self Made Women 2020

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Ankiti Bose is the CEO of Zilingo, a technology and commerce platform for fashion retailers, valued at $970 million. Zilingo, which works largely in the southeast Asian markets, came within sniffing distance of becoming a unicorn during its last fund-raise in mid-2019.

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Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari quit a lucrative career in advertising to pursue her passion for filmmaking. She has since directed Nil Battey Sannata (2016), Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017) and Panga (2020), which have all been critically acclaimed.

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Dutee Chand, 24, is a national record holder in 100 metres and a double silver medallist in the 2018 Asian Games. In 2019, she became the first Indian to win a gold medal at the world university games. But what elevates her achievements from being mere athletic feats is that, in 2014, Chand was banned from competition on grounds of hyperandrogenism. Then 19, the sprinter fought the world athletics body and got her ban overturned. Last year, Chand also came out as India's first gay athlete.

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Geeta Goel, the country manager for the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has been busy helping transform the lives of urban low-income communities through better education and financial inclusion. An impact investor, Goel led the foundation's investments in over 35 portfolio companies and committed over $100 million in the country.

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Geetha Manjunath, who has over 25 years of experience in IT research, is the founder and CEO of Niramai, a deep tech startup that has developed a solution for detecting early stage breast cancer in a privacy-aware manner.

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A Supreme Court advocate, much of Karuna Nundy's focus is on human rights and media law. Nundy, 43, is known especially for her role in framing India's anti-rape bill after the Delhi gangrape of 2012, and for relentlessly fighting for the victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Most recently, Nundy has been appointed to a UK panel of experts to build frameworks that protect media freedom across the world.

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Manasi Joshi, who lost her leg in an accident, represents India as a para-badminton athlete. In 2019, she won her first gold at the BWF Para-badminton World Championships in the SL3 category in Basel, Switzerland.

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Monika Shergill, a seasoned media professional with more than two decades of experience, heads the series team for Netflix in India. Shergill has previously done stints at Viacom 18 Digital Ventures, Zee, Sony and Star India Network. As head of non-fiction programming and strategy at Star, she helmed the biggest network multilingual content project, the series, 'Satyamev Jayate' for Star Plus and nine other network channels.

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After having worked at Morgan Stanley on Wall Street, Neera Nundy, along with her husband Deval Sanghavi, decided to use their corporate skills in the not-for-profit sector. In an attempt to create a greater impact and formalise the sector, Nundy set up an NGO for NGOs, Dasra, to help streamline the funding process.

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When Neha Rastogi couldn't find a handy handheld ECG device to keep a check on her father-in-law who lived in another city, the 38-year-old engineer-by-training decided to design one herself. Today, SanketLife 2.0, as the keychain-sized device is called, can take a complete medical grade 12-lead ECG and generate a report that can be easily shared with a doctor.

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Nupur Garg has many firsts to her name since she started her finance career back in 1997. Till last year, Garg was the regional lead-South Asia Private Equity Funds for International Finance Corp. To bolster more participation of women in private equity, she has now launched WinPE, an association for women in India, backed by some of the largest funds operating in the country. She is also the first woman to be inducted by SIDBI as a board member to oversee its fund of funds vertical.

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Padma Parthasarthy, 54, leads consulting for Tech Mahindra globally and is also at the forefront of getting the IT major more attuned to the digital needs of clients. Over the next decade, transforming Tech Mahindra into a digital services company will be a key challenge and Parthasarthy will play a pivotal role. She was a key part of the team that integrated Satyam into Tech Mahindra.

At 13, Poorna Malavath—the daughter of agricultural workers from a remote village in Telangana—became the youngest girl in the world to scale Mt Everest. Her inspiring journey prompted Rahul Bose to make a film on her. Now 19, Malavath is studying in the US and has conquered the highest peaks in six of the seven continents.

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Pranjul Bhandari, at 38, is a macro-economist of repute, having worked in both public policy (India's Ministry of Finance and British Govt) and private sector (Goldman Sachs and HSBC). Part of former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan's original team, as an economist at the Office of the Chief Economic Advisor, she excelled as a researcher. At HSBC, she has been noted for her original research on the correlation between water reservoirs and agricultural produce and e-commerce and jobs.

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Muthayya Vanitha, an electronics systems engineer, is the project director of ISRO's Chandrayaan 2 mission. Ritu Karidhal Srivastava is the Mission Director of ISRO's Chandrayaan 2 mission. She previously was instrumental in building its onward autonomy system.

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Suchita Salwan always loved exploring new restaurants, cafes and cultural hotspots. Today, her entrepreneurial venture, Little Black Book (LBB) has emerged as a community-driven platform with over 4.5 million monthly active users. It provides local recommendations for food, events and shopping in eight Indian cities.

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Since January 2015, Supriya Paul has been using the power of storytelling to create an ecosystem to empower the youth through Josh Talks, inspiring the youth to chase its dreams and fulfil aspirations.

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Usha Vishwakarma, who is a survivor of attempted sexual assault, started Lucknow-based Red Brigade about a decade ago after she was attacked. It took her almost two years to recover from trauma. The group organises marches, awareness campaigns and self-defense training. They have trained about 1.57 lakh women in self-defense.

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After a successful first stint in banking where she rose to head Credit Suisse's investment banking and global markets solutions business in India, Vedika Bhandarkar made a switch to the social sector. As managing director of Water.org in India, she oversees the not-for-profit's strategy, growth and water and sanitation programme expansion in the country.

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Vidya Balan's career so far has been about breaking stereotypes, empowering herself and being above the rat-race. While her breakout character in 2019 was that of scientist Tara Shinde in Mission Mangal, she also branched out to the South-Indian film industry. In the two-part big-budget Telugu biopics NTR: Kathanayakudu and NTR: Mahanayakudu, she received critical acclaim for playing the role of Basavatarakam, the strong-headed wife of late actor-politician NT Rama Rao. Balan also made her Tamil film debut in a brief role opposite superstar Ajith Kumar in Nerkonda Paarvai, the remake of the 2016 Hindi film Pink.