The Wind Beneath Her Wings

Tulsi Tanti had built a company that was then the market leader in the renewable energy space. But to hold that position with the changing times required the current generation to bring in new energy and get people to buy into it. As they say, it’s easy to create a new setup but the difficult part is to bring in changes to that existing setup. For Nidhi, it wasn’t easy to find her place in the business but it was her grit and persistence that didn’t let her lose focus.

- Punita Sabharwal

At the recently concluded women’s day, Nidhi launched a ‘women at work’ campaign to increase the number of women working in this out-an-out male dominated sector. The campaign was not only about finding a mention on the papers, Nidhi has closely looked into the working conditions at many sites and worked towards strengthening the safety systems to ensure more women participation. She launched Climb-Assist, which is an electrical lift for the women in service maintenance.

Nidhi’s memory of seeing her father in the business goes back to the days when Tulsi Tanti used to manage a textile factory in Surat, Gujarat. As the story goes, Tanti’s grit was so strong that to do away with high expenses for electricity along with issues related to outages, he ordered two wind turbines to take his factory offgrid. When other businesses started showing interest, he realized that the future lies in wind energy. With this belief, Suzlon was started in 1995 in Pune.

THE ENERGY EMPRESS:

We meet Nidhi at Suzlon headquarters, which is very much in tandem with its green image. Sprawling across 10 acres of land, the campus is managed responsibly and gives a feeling of having an office in the garden. From rainwater harvesting to using solar panels to generating electricity in-house or the campus being designed ergonomically to reduce the use of airconditioners - ‘One Earth’ is another marvel by the man.