Saturday, March 05, 2005

The story of India's richest woman

   Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon has risen from middle class background to India's richest woman by sheer hardwork and grit.
   Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw should have been afraid. Every day for three months in 1985 she waded through a crowd of angry employees to get to her office at Biocon India, a maker of enzymes in Bangalore. This was her payback for hiring uneducated employees.
   After they joined a communist labor union, she retaliated by automating the plant. The crowd outside burned her in effigy.
   "I didn't think they'd hurt a woman," she says. But her detractors have certainly tried to hold her back, making it about as tough as possible for a woman to find her way.
   Still, over the last two decades Mazumdar-Shaw, now 51, has turned a small enzyme manufacturer into one of India's premier tech companies. It netted $30.5 million on revenue of $122 million for the fiscal year ended Mar. 31.
    Read the full story here.

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