KIRAN MAZUMDAR SHAW

She’s India’s good-girl billionaire, who overcame rejection and gender bias and went on to lead one of the most successful biotechnology companies in the country.

- Renuka Joshi Modi

In September this year, Biocon Limited’s executive chairperson Kiran Mazumdar Shaw was trending across the globe, and not for the usual business of pharma reasons. The 67-year-old Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awardee became a viral sensation, pun not intended, when her blog chronicling her experience and recovery from COVID-19 made the rounds from Sydney to Spain (even being translated into Spanish).

It’s mid-September when we speak and she has since recovered from the virus, jumping straight into a packed diary. Looking back, she says she was surprised at the attention but also thrilled. “I wanted to remove the stigma around being tested positive. I wanted people to know that even if you have the slightest symptoms, please go and test yourself. I know far too many people who have unnecessarily put themselves into a serious condition because they did not test and report themselves,” she tells me over a Zoom call from her home in Bengaluru, where she is staying with her husband, John, and her 89-year-old mother Yamini. “I had to be particularly careful, as my husband is a cancer patient and my mother is a cancer survivor,” she says.

Just as she didn’t flinch from sharing her own COVID-19 experience to break the stigma, she has used her experience and that of her family’s with the Big C to fund a 1,400-bed cancer facility in collaboration with Dr. Devi Shetty, the founder of Narayana Health. Mazumdar Shaw has consistently made professional personal, practicing a more ‘compassionate capitalism’ and becoming one of the few pharma leaders with clear humanitarian goals.

REJECTION TO RETALIATION