Someone Said It Right: Women Run the World
Kiran Mazumdar is the Chairman & Managing Director of Biocon Limited: India’s largest listed biotechnology company based in Bengaluru and is also the former chairperson of IIM Bengaluru. In the year 1978, with an investment of Rs
10,000 in a rented garage space in Bengalaru, Kiran started her business journey, little was known that she will become the richest woman of India (in the year 2004) with a net worth of more than Rs 2,000 crore. She was also on the Forbes 2005 list of India’s 40 richest people.
At the beginning of her entrepreneur journey, she encountered numerous challenges like credibility due to her age, gender & her untested business model. She faced funding problems as no bank was interested in lending her the money without a guarantor plus she had a difficult time while employing people as nobody wanted to work in a startup owned by a woman. Consequently, her first employee was a retired garage mechanic.
Other than that, she faced quite a few troublesome technological challenges like unstable infrastructure, power, poor quality water, unhygienic labs, low-quality research equipment, workers without advanced scientific skills etc. But that did not demotivate her to work on her dream project.
She overcame all the challenges and within a year of its inception, Biocon India became India’s first company to
be able to manufacture enzymes and export them to the United States and Europe. Apart from Biocon, Kiran has been
doing numerous philanthropic activities. She has a CSR wing called Biocon Foundation that works on health, education, and infrastructure in rural areas of Karnataka. She supports the Arogya Raksha Yojana and also established the Mazumdar Shaw Cancer Centre in Bengaluru. She doesn’t like the term “philanthropy”, believing that it often provides temporary solutions rather than addressing the root cause of the problem. She prefers the term “compassionate capitalist”, considering that properly applied business models can offer an ongoing foundation for sustainable social
progress.
With a net worth of $3.2 billion, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is now among the top richest women in the world and is named as one of the most influential people in the world of science and technology (by Forbes). Not only did she grow Biocon to a stage where it is the 4th largest producer of insulin in the world, as a part of the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry in India and the US-India CEO Forum, As of 2010, she was named among TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. She is on the 2011 Financial Times’ top 50 women in business list.
In 2014, she was listed as the 92nd most powerful woman in the world by Forbes. In 2015. She was voted global Indian of the year by Pharma Leaders Magazine in 2012. The list of her achievements and award is long, which proves that regardless of gender, financial, or any other obstacles if one has determination and perseverance, one can achieve all his dreams and be on the top.
