Person of the Day: Roshni Nadar Malhotra, From Newsroom to HCLTech Chair

Most people who run a $14 billion technology company spent their twenties climbing the corporate ladder. Roshni Nadar Malhotra spent part of hers in television newsrooms. The chairperson of HCLTech trained as a journalist, produced stories for international broadcasters, and only later stepped into the business her father built. That detour, oddly, is one of the most interesting things about her rise, and it sits behind a career that now tops India's wealth rankings.

This profile sticks to the public record: her professional path, the milestones that mark it, and the institutions she has built or now leads. It is a story about how a media-trained communicator became one of the most consequential figures in Indian technology and education.

The career journey of Roshni Nadar Malhotra began far from IT

She studied Communications at Northwestern University in the United States, and her first instinct was journalism rather than enterprise software. Early in her career she worked in broadcast media, producing news for outlets including CNN in America and Sky News in the UK. It was hands-on storytelling work, the kind that teaches you to cut through noise and explain complicated things simply.

That grounding matters. Running a global services firm is, in large part, a communication job: aligning tens of thousands of employees, reassuring clients, and setting a direction people can actually follow. She later added an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, where she was recognised with the Schaffner Award. The combination of a communicator's instincts and a manager's training would define her style.

Joining the business, then learning it from the inside

She joined the HCL group in 2008 and took on a leadership role at HCL Corporation the following year. Rather than being parachuted straight to the top, she spent years inside the machinery of a sprawling technology house, understanding how a services giant wins clients, prices work, and keeps talent.

Those years were her apprenticeship in the realities of the industry. India's IT sector runs on long client relationships, delivery discipline, and the constant pressure to move up the value chain from basic support into consulting, engineering and now artificial intelligence. By the time bigger responsibilities came, she had seen the business from several angles rather than just the boardroom.

A historic appointment in 2020

In July 2020, she became chairperson of HCL Technologies, succeeding the company's founder. The appointment carried a distinction that says a lot about Indian corporate history: she became the first woman to chair a listed Indian IT company. For an industry that India holds up as a global success story, that was a notable first.

The timing was not gentle. She took the chair in the middle of a pandemic that forced the entire services industry to reinvent how it worked, almost overnight. Steering a company through that period, while keeping clients and a vast workforce steady, was a serious test of leadership rather than a ceremonial handover.

Under her chairmanship the company, now branded HCLTech, has continued to scale. It has grown into a business with revenue in the region of $14 billion, competing globally in IT services, engineering and digital consulting, with artificial intelligence and cloud work increasingly at the centre of its pitch.

Topping India's rich list

In 2025 her standing was underlined in a very public way. She topped the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025, recorded as India's richest woman with wealth of roughly ₹2.84 lakh crore. The ranking carried two further firsts worth noting: she became the first woman to break into the top three of the list overall, and she was the youngest name in the top ten.

Numbers like these are a snapshot, tied to share prices and valuations on a given day. But the milestone is real. For decades the upper reaches of Indian business wealth were an almost exclusively male list. A woman leading a technology company to the very top of it is a genuine shift, and a marker that will be cited for years.

Building schools, not just balance sheets

If the corporate story is one half of her public work, education and conservation are the other. She is closely involved with the Shiv Nadar Foundation, which over its life has channelled around $1.5 billion into building educational and nation-building institutions. The foundation's footprint includes universities, colleges and schools that aim to be genuinely world-class rather than merely large.

Her most personal project in this space is VidyaGyan, a leadership academy for meritorious but economically disadvantaged rural students, with a strong base in Uttar Pradesh. The idea is direct: find bright children from villages who would otherwise be overlooked, give them an elite education, and let them become leaders in their own communities. In 2023 the programme was recognised with a Children's Champion Award for that work.

A few strands run through her philanthropy:

• Education at scale, through the Shiv Nadar Foundation's network of institutions
• Opportunity for rural talent, via VidyaGyan's leadership academies
• Conservation, through The Habitats Trust, which she founded in 2018 to protect India's natural habitats and lesser-known species

She also serves on the global board of a major international conservation organisation, extending that interest in the environment well beyond India's borders.

Why her leadership stands out

Beyond the headline numbers, one quieter change is telling. Under her watch, the HCLTech board moved to roughly 50% women, among the highest shares of any large global technology company. In an industry that talks constantly about diversity and delivers it unevenly, that is a concrete result rather than a slogan.

It fits a pattern visible across her work. She tends to back things that compound slowly: a board reshaped, schools built, rural students nurtured into leaders, habitats protected. None of those pay off in a single quarter. All of them outlast any one balance sheet.

What her story signals

For young Indians, and especially young women weighing a path in technology or business, her arc offers a useful, unglamorous lesson. She did not follow a straight line. She started in a completely different field, learned the family business from the ground up over more than a decade, and only then took the top job, where she has had to prove herself through a pandemic and an AI-driven upheaval of her own industry.

The richest-woman tag will grab the headlines. The more durable story is a media-trained leader who turned a global technology company over to a new generation of priorities, and who is quietly using its success to build schools and protect forests. On any given day, that is a career journey worth holding up as an example.