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New York, As many as eight Indian women, led by ICICI Bank chief Chanda Kochhar, have made it to the Fortune list of 25 most powerful women “shaping the new world order” in the Asia-Pacific region.
Kochhar, ranked highest among Indian women, has been ranked second across the region, while three others — SBI’s Arundhati Bhattacharya (4th), HPCL’s Nishi Vasudeva (5th) and Axis Bank’s Shikha Sharma (10th) — have also made it to the top-10.
The list is topped by Australian banking major Westpac’s chief Gail Kelly.
Other Indians on the top-25 list include Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (19th), National Stock Exchange CEO Chitra Ramkrishna (22nd), HSBC’s Naina Lal Kidwai (23rd) and TAFE Chairman and CEO Mallika Srinivasan (25th).
Releasing the latest rankings, the Fortune magazine said that women around the world are continuing to win the top jobs, so much so that more than a third of the women on this Asia-Pacific list are making their debut in the coveted list, including two from India.
The two Indian new entrants are Bhattacharya and Vasudeva.
“More and more businesswomen are taking tougher jobs and helming bigger firms. More than a third of the women on our Asia-Pacific list are making their MPW (most powerful women) debut,” Fortune said.
Among Indians, Bhattacharya is ranked second after Kochhar and is the first woman to hold the three-year post at SBI, who oversees a 208-year-old institution with USD 400 billion in assets and 218,000 employees dispersed among 16,000 bank branches across India.
On the other hand, Vasudeva, 58, became the first woman to head an Indian oil company and is “and one of only four women to helm a Global Fortune 500 firm in the Asia-Pacific region”.
NSE’s Ramakrishna is the only woman on the list heading a stock exchange.
Meanwhile, PepsiCo’s India-born CEO Indra Nooyi has been ranked third among world’s most powerful business woman by Fortune in its worldwide list. Nooyi is only Indian-origin woman on this year’s global list, which has been topped by IBM Chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty and General Motors CEO Mary Barra.
