🇮🇳 Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

She was the daughter of Rasendra Mazumdar, head brewer at United Breweries in Bangalore — the man who built Kingfisher beer. He sent her to Ballarat in Australia to study malting and brewing because he saw no reason a daughter could not inherit a profession his sons might. She came back in 1975 a qualified master brewer, the first woman in the trade in India, and discovered that no Indian brewery would hire her. They offered her secretarial work instead.

In 1978 a chance meeting in Bangalore with Leslie Auchincloss, founder of Biocon Biochemicals of Cork, Ireland, turned into a joint venture. Auchincloss needed an Indian partner to extract papain and isinglass — enzymes used in brewing and food processing — from local papayas and fish bladders. He offered Mazumdar a thirty per cent stake if she could set up operations. She rented a small shed, hired a retired tractor mechanic, and registered Biocon India on 29 November 1978.

The first years were a procession of small humiliations and small triumphs. Banks refused her loans without a male guarantor. Suppliers demanded cash in advance. A landlord evicted the company because he did not believe a woman could run an industrial unit. She paid her first employees from a personal overdraft. By 1980 Biocon was exporting enzymes to the United States and Europe; by 1989 it had become the first Indian biotech firm to receive US funding, when ICI bought Auchincloss's stake and Mazumdar bought it back later.

The pivot from industrial enzymes to pharmaceuticals came in the late 1990s. She had married John Shaw, a Scottish textile executive, in 1998 and the two of them, with a small team of fermentation scientists, decided to bet the company on biopharmaceuticals — proteins produced by genetically engineered organisms, then a frontier technology almost no Indian firm dared attempt. Biocon's first statin, lovastatin, was produced by fermentation in 2001, undercutting global prices and turning the company, for the first time, into something other than a contract manufacturer.

The Biocon IPO of March 2004 was the moment Indian biotech announced itself to the world. The issue was oversubscribed thirty-three times. Biocon became, on its first day of trading, one of very few Indian companies to cross a billion dollars in market capitalisation on listing. Mazumdar-Shaw, who had begun in a shed with ten thousand rupees, became the country's wealthiest woman. Forbes called her India's first self-made woman billionaire.

What she did with that money mattered as much as how she made it. She built the Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Centre in Bangalore in 2009 — an affordable-care hospital attached to Narayana Health that treats poor patients at one-tenth the cost of comparable Western facilities. She funded biosimilar insulin programmes that brought diabetes treatment within reach for millions of Indians and Malaysians. She placed the cancer-research arm of the foundation under the directorship of her husband, who would die in 2022.

By the 2020s Biocon had become a global generics force, manufacturing biosimilars of Herceptin, Humira, and Lantus, with operations in Malaysia, the United States, and Europe. She handed the chief executive role to professional managers and stepped into the role of executive chairperson, mentor, and increasingly outspoken public voice on Indian science policy. She was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2005 and named to TIME 100 in 2010.

She still lives in Bangalore, in the same neighbourhood she grew up in. She speaks, frequently and bluntly, about the casual sexism that nearly ended her career before it began — the bank managers, the landlords, the suppliers who would not take her cheques. She has said, with the dryness of someone who lived it, that being a woman in Indian industry in 1978 was less a glass ceiling than a brick wall. She walked through it anyway, with a drum of papain and a tractor mechanic, and an entire scientific industry walked through after her.