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Indian woman third on Fortune list

Naina Lal Kidwai, vice chairman of J M Morgan Stanley (India), was Thursday ranked third among top businesswomen in Asia, by Fortune magazine.

She is the only Indian to figure among six most powerful businesswomen in Asia.

The magazine said, ''Traditionally, women in business made their way to the top through family connections or government service. Many still do. But the new economy, with its flexible structures and ethos of meritocracy, is providing an important avenue of advancement for women of talent and determination.''

It also listed America's 50 most powerful women and six most powerful businesswomen from Europe.

It said that half of them work in industries that did not exist a decade ago.

Profiling Kidwai (43), it said she has ridden a flair for numbers to become India's most important investment banker in its most important investment bank in what may become its most important industry -- information technology.

Her odyssey began in 1977, it said, when she graduated from Delhi University with an economics degree.

"I decided that acquiring more degrees was my best safeguard against gender discrimination," she told the magazine. So she did a chartered accountancy course in India, then in 1982 became the first female Indian citizen to graduate from Harvard Business School. She rose through the ranks at ANZ Grindlays during the 1980s and joined Morgan Stanley in 1994 as head of investment banking, just as the country's info-tech industry began to blossom.

Fortune said that things got off to a rocky start. In 1995, the company suffered a black eye when a domestic mutual fund it launched turned into a fiasco. But by 1999, JM Morgan Stanley was the No 1 investment bank in India in terms of M&A, with deals worth nearly $700 million, it added.

It attributed the astonishing turnaround in large part to Kidwai.

She was the one, it said, who decided that Morgan should go full-speed ahead in IT, and her connections helped the firm succeed.

Though Kidwai is based in New Delhi, she spends much of her time shuttling to tech hotspots like Hyderabad and Bangalore, to raise cash for Nasdaq-listed IT companies like Wipro and Infosys.

Kidwai handles both accounts, drawing in lucrative deals like Wipro's forthcoming $200 million to $300 million ADR issue, Fortune said.

Morgan is now setting its sights on getting a piece of India's agonizingly slow, but potentially lucrative, privatization action. Again, Kidwai is leading the charge, it said.

It concluded by saying that her current challenge was to persuade foreign investors like British Airways to take a stake in Air-India, which it labeled 'the world's least-favorite airline'.

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