Roshni Nadar Malhotra Biography: Newsroom to HCL Chair

Key facts
Born	16 September 1981, per HCLTech’s register of directors (some profiles say 1982)
Hometown / family roots	New Delhi, where she went to school; father Shiv Nadar was born in a village in Tamil Nadu
Education	Vasant Valley School, New Delhi; undergraduate degree in communication (radio/TV/film), Northwestern University, 2003; MBA, Kellogg School of Management, 2008
Family	Only child of HCL founder Shiv Nadar and art collector Kiran Nadar; married Shikhar Malhotra in 2010
Company / Group	Chairperson, HCLTech (since July 2020) and the HCL Group; CEO, HCL Corporation; trustee, Shiv Nadar Foundation
Hurun India Rich List 2026	Rank 5, “Roshni Nadar Malhotra & family”, Rs 2,78,500 crore (about US$29 billion at Hurun’s exchange rate), down 2% on the year
Known for	First woman to chair a listed Indian IT company; India’s richest woman; VidyaGyan schools and The Habitats Trust

In 2013, at her first board meeting of HCL Technologies, Roshni Nadar Malhotra struggled to follow what was being said. Everyone, Business Today later wrote, was talking in jargon: IMS for infrastructure management services, for instance. The founder’s daughter, then 31, had been a television news producer, not an engineer. “I just kept saying, why don’t you just say the full form?” she recalled. [23]

Almost twelve years after that meeting, on 6 March 2025, her father signed two gift deeds. They moved 47% of two private family holding companies, which between them held about 44% of HCLTech, from Shiv Nadar to his only child, and made her the majority owner of both. [59] Within days Bloomberg’s index counted her as the third-richest Indian. [60]

On the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2026, released on 23 September 2026, “Roshni Nadar Malhotra & family” stand fifth with Rs 2,78,500 crore, behind Gautam Adani, Mukesh Ambani, Lakshmi Mittal and Cyrus Poonawalla. She is the richest woman in India. [20][21]

Hers is a different kind of story from the others in this series. She did not start the company that made her rich; her father and five colleagues did, in a rooftop room in Delhi in 1976. What she has had to do is different: learn, over sixteen years, to be the owner of a technology company with more than 2.2 lakh employees without being a technologist, and then chair it while artificial intelligence shakes the industry it belongs to. This is how that happened, what she has added, and what has gone wrong on her watch.

Where it began

Roshni Nadar was born on 16 September 1981, according to the statutory register of directors that HCLTech publishes; some profiles give the year as 1982. [1] She went to school in Delhi, at Vasant Valley School. [30] “I don’t have any siblings,” she told an interviewer in 2016, explaining why the family’s wealth would one day need her attention. [23]

The money was new. Her father, Shiv Nadar, was born in 1945 in a village in Tamil Nadu, took an electrical engineering degree from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, and came to Delhi in the 1960s as a management trainee at the textile group DCM. [38] In 1971 he was made head of sales and marketing at its new electronics unit, DCM Data Products. [36]

In 1976 he and five colleagues quit. Co-founder Ajai Chowdhry recalled the moment on the company’s 50th anniversary: the six pooled Rs 1.87 lakh from savings and loans, one of them sold a car, and they rented a barsati in Golf Links. “It was 1976. Startups were not really a thing in India. Venture capital did not exist,” he said. Uttar Pradesh’s state electronics corporation had a manufacturing licence; the young men had the design. The joint venture became Hindustan Computers Ltd. Its first customers were IIT Kharagpur and IIT Madras, and the first computer was sold while it was still being designed, with only a brochure and a mock-up to show. [35] (Chowdhry and the trade publication DQ Channels name six founders; some later timelines speak of eight engineers.) [36][37]

Her mother, Kiran Nadar, started out in advertising, at the agency MCM. She began buying art in the 1980s while furnishing their home, commissioned work from M.F. Husain, opened the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in 2010, and plays bridge at international level. [39] Roshni jokes about what she did not inherit: “I blame my parents for bad parenting because I neither speak Tamil nor do I play bridge.” [27]

She grew up inside the company without being trained for it. “I have been around Shiv, been around all these CEOs at the office literally since I was a kid,” she has said. But nobody pushed her towards a laboratory. “If Shiv had serious plans for HCL, he would have asked me to do Science in Grade 12 and then put me in engineering. But I did commerce.” [24] A PTI profile also describes her as a trained classical musician. [30]

“My parents gave me a lot of freedom and openness to do as I wanted,” she said later. [26] She used it. She went to Northwestern University near Chicago to study economics, switched to radio, television and film, and graduated in 2003. [26][22][18] She interned at CNBC and CNN, and her first job was at Sky News in London, as a news producer. [22][27] She has said she spent a year and a half there; Forbes put it at three years. [24][27]

At that point the heir to one of India’s largest technology fortunes wanted to make television.

The first break

Her father did not order her home. He argued with her ambition on its own terms. “He was keen that I go to B-school and made the point that I could never be a Rupert Murdoch unless I learned how to manage a business,” she told Forbes. [22] In a later telling: “He said that even if your dream is to have a media empire, you would still need to know the ins and outs of the business. So, please go and attend business school.” [24]

She went back to Northwestern, to the Kellogg School of Management, and finished her MBA in 2008. A lot of her classmates, she recalled, “had come from the consulting, investment banking, and financial worlds”; she had come from a newsroom. [18] She interned at HCL while she was there. [26]

Then things moved fast. She joined the board of HCL Corporation, the family’s holding company, in September 2008 and was appointed its chief executive in April 2009. [23] The appointment became public that July. She was 27, one year out of business school. [22]

Forbes asked the obvious question: wasn’t this too much, too soon? “I’ve been living quietly, away from it all for 27 years. All this sudden media attention is slightly overwhelming. I guess I should be scared!” she replied. Why the holding company and not the technology businesses? “My contribution in the tech companies would have been incremental, as I have so much still to learn. I’m not IT-inclined.” Her father’s only weakness, she said, “is that he tends to micromanage a fair bit.” [22]

Years later she described it more bluntly. “It was an instant push into the deep end,” she said. [24]

The job was an owner’s job, not an operator’s. HCL Corporation held the family’s stakes in two listed companies, the software exporter HCL Technologies and the hardware maker HCL Infosystems. [22] Her early work, by her own account, was in its treasury, its brand and its social projects. [22]

The social projects are where she was first given something to build. In 2009, the year she became CEO, the Shiv Nadar Foundation started VidyaGyan, a free residential school for gifted children from poor rural families in Uttar Pradesh. [84] She chairs it. [8] “When VidyaGyan started in 2009, the first batch was selected from 10,000 students through admission tests,” Business Today reported in 2016. “This year, 123 students were picked from 133,000 students.” [23]

She set its ambition high. She hoped, she said in 2015, that “in my lifetime, one of the VidyaGyan students will be the prime minister of India”. [28]

In 2010 she married Shikhar Malhotra, whom she had described to Forbes the year before as “a distributor for Honda”. [31][22] He joined the group, founded HCL Healthcare, and in October 2019 was appointed to the HCL Technologies board as a non-executive director. [8][43]

Building the empire

What she inherited

To judge what she has done, start with what she was handed.

On HCL’s 40th birthday in 2016, a poster at its Noida campus told the origin story. “At the height of the Indian emergency, a group of fearless men got together in a garage,” it read. “In 1978, alongside Apple, and three years before IBM, we launched one of the world’s first PCs.” [23]

The hardware company slowly became a software one. HCL Technologies listed on 11 January 2000, when it had about 3,000 employees and annual revenue of US$166 million. [5] In 2008 it outbid Infosys to buy the British SAP consultancy Axon for GBP 441 million. [40] In December 2018 it agreed to pay US$1.8 billion for a set of IBM software products, including Notes and Domino. [41] In 2018-19 its revenue of US$8.63 billion overtook Wipro’s, making it India’s third-largest IT services company. [42]

All of this happened under professional chief executives. C Vijayakumar has held the job since 2016. [51] “HCL was set up to be professional in nature at which point my father was playing the role of chief strategy officer and chairman of the board, but he wasn’t the CEO,” she said in 2025. [25] That one design choice explains most of her career. She was never going to run the company day to day. She was going to own it and chair it, while professional managers ran it.

The long apprenticeship

She joined the HCL Technologies board on 29 July 2013. [1] That was the meeting with the acronyms. In October 2018 she became vice-chairperson. [32]

A former HCL executive, Rajeev Sawhney, described what Shiv Nadar was doing in those years: “The way he has spent time nurturing her, in sharing his wisdom, is a rare privilege.” Her own summary was shorter. “If you have to inherit what your parents have created, you also have to learn to be accountable.” [23]

She was also frank about what she saw. Speaking at Babson College in 2017, she said: “Within the top 200 leaders of our company—out of 120,000 employees—we don’t have a single woman leader.” [29]

July 2020: the chair

On 17 July 2020, alongside quarterly results that showed net profit of Rs 2,925 crore, HCL Technologies announced that Shiv Nadar, then 75, was stepping down as chairman. His daughter, 38, took over. He stayed on as managing director with the title of chief strategy officer. [32] She became the first woman to chair a listed Indian IT company. [34]

The company took care to say that nothing dramatic had happened. Vijayakumar, who at the time was not even on the board, said that “governance and oversight will definitely be an important aspect of her role.” The promoters then owned about 60% of the company, and Suraj Malik, a partner at the advisory firm BDO, saw the logic: “In the context of HCL, it is a fair thing to do. People would have otherwise got confused on the power centre.” [33]

Her own line was: “He’s really not going anywhere.” She also insisted, despite the family’s majority, that “we are a board-driven company.” [27] Her father had described the risk in an earlier conversation with Business Standard: “HCL has become an elephant and elephants can run only at a certain pace. So they have to be mindful of the fact that the deer can easily outpace them.” [32]

A year later he went further. In July 2021 Shiv Nadar resigned as managing director and took the title of chairman emeritus and strategic adviser to the board for five years. Vijayakumar became CEO and managing director. [34] He was an unusual founder, she said in 2025, because “most founders retire but don’t leave. He retired and left the board, too.” [25] HCLTech’s leadership page still lists him as chairman emeritus. [8]

Asked how she handles a job that large, she has said: “There is no way to fill his boots. That’s true, so I prefer to say that I stand on his shoulders.” [24]

What changed on her watch

In the financial year before she took the chair, 2019-20, HCL Technologies earned revenue of Rs 70,678 crore and net income of Rs 11,062 crore, with 150,423 employees. [44] In 2025-26 revenue was Rs 1,30,144 crore (US$14.7 billion), up about 84%, and the company employed more than 2.27 lakh people in 60 countries. [3][45]

Some markers along the way:

• 2020: revenue crossed US$10 billion for the calendar year. The company paid every employee with a year’s service a bonus of about ten days’ salary, more than Rs 700 crore in all. [6]
• 2022: HCL Technologies rebranded as HCLTech, with the tagline “Supercharging Progress”. [46]
• 2023: it bought ASAP Group, a German automotive engineering firm, for EUR 251 million. [47]
• 2024: it sold its 49% stake in a joint venture back to State Street for US$172.5 million plus book value. [48]
• 2025: its software arm agreed to buy the analytics platform Jaspersoft for US$240 million. [49]

The boardroom, at least, looks different from the leadership bench she described in 2017. In her 2026 letter to shareholders she wrote that HCLTech has “one of the most gender-diverse boards in India, with over 50% women directors”. [2]

The company also hands most of its profit back to shareholders. By December 2024 it had paid a dividend for 88 quarters in a row, and in 2025-26 it distributed 97.6% of net income. [5][2] Because the family owns about 60.8% of the company, most of that goes to the promoters: Rs 9,906 crore in 2024-25, the largest dividend income among the promoter families in a Business Standard analysis. [50] The holding company, in turn, funds the family’s foundation. [28]

The board she chairs also pays its chief executive well. Vijayakumar earned US$10.85 million (about Rs 94.6 crore) in 2024-25, more than the chiefs of TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Tech Mahindra that year, and the board approved a package of US$18.6 million from 2025-26. [51]

The bets: AI, products and chips

Three bets define her chairmanship.

The first is AI. “In Q2 of FY26, we were the first in our industry to report $100 million in AI revenue,” she told Business Today. [25] By March 2026 the company put its “advanced AI” revenue at an annualised US$620 million, and her letter to shareholders set the goal “to be the world’s best AI solutions provider”. [45][2]

The second is owning products, not just selling hours. At the India AI Impact Summit on 19 February 2026 she put it sharply: “India must move from being a tech services led nation to an IP led nation. Services scale with effort. IP scales infinitely.” [52] The gap she is pointing at is large. Software products were only 2.9% of the US$221 billion of software India exported in 2025-26, as our analysis of the RBI survey shows.

The third takes the group back to hardware, where it began. On 14 May 2025 the Union Cabinet approved a Rs 3,706 crore chip assembly and test plant near Jewar airport in Uttar Pradesh, a joint venture of the HCL Group and Foxconn. It is designed to handle 20,000 wafers and turn out 36 million display driver chips a month. [53] The Prime Minister laid the foundation stone on 21 February 2026. The Cabinet note had spoken of production in 2027; at the ceremony she said, “Manufacturing here will start in 2028.” [54] (Electronics are now among India’s fastest-growing exports, as this CapitalVia insight explains.)

In July 2026 HCLTech also signed a memorandum with the Odisha government for a technology centre in Bhubaneswar and its first AI data centre, an investment the company put at Rs 14,257 crore including government assistance. [56]

How the wealth is actually held

Here is the most surprising number in this story. In the shareholding pattern for September 2025, Roshni Nadar Malhotra, India’s richest woman, personally owned 696 shares of HCLTech. Her father owned 736. [9]

The fortune sits one level up. The promoter group held 60.81% of HCLTech in that filing. Vama Sundari Investments (Delhi) Pvt Ltd, known as Vama Delhi, held 44.17% and another promoter company, HCL Holdings Pvt Ltd, held 16.46%, with small holdings in the foundation, the museum and family members. None of it was pledged. [9]

So the key to the group is Vama Delhi, along with HCL Corporation, the holding company she has run since 2009, which is the largest shareholder of HCL Infosystems. Until 2025 Shiv Nadar owned 51% of each; his daughter had 10.33%. [58][59] The handover was done in two careful steps.

First, permission. She applied to SEBI for an exemption from the rule that anyone acquiring control of a listed company must make an open offer to public shareholders. On 22 November 2024 SEBI granted it. [57] The regulator, Zee Business reported, emphasised that the transfers were “non-commercial in nature, aimed solely at family reorganisation and succession planning”; the total promoter holding would not change. [58]

Then, the deeds. On 6 March 2025 Shiv Nadar gifted her 47% of each company. He kept 4%; she moved to 57.33%. The stock exchange filing said the deeds were “executed pursuant to a private family arrangement intended to streamline succession, which would ensure continuity of ownership and control by Shiv Nadar Family”. [59] She became the majority owner of both holding companies and, through them, the largest shareholder of HCLTech and HCL Infosystems. [60]

The rankings followed. The Hurun Global Rich List in March 2025 valued her at Rs 3.5 lakh crore and ranked her the fifth-richest woman in the world. [61] The Hurun India list that October placed her third at Rs 2.84 lakh crore, the first woman ever in its top three. [62] Hurun’s global list in March 2026 put her at Rs 3.2 lakh crore, still third in India. [63] Forbes, which counts differently, still listed the fortune under Shiv Nadar’s name in its 2025 India ranking, at US$33.2 billion. [64]

The setbacks and failures

The company her father started with

The oldest part of the HCL story is also its clearest failure. HCL Infosystems, the listed hardware arm that once sold India its computers, decided in 2013 to shut its PC manufacturing after a year of failing to find a buyer. “Currently, there are only sellers of PC business in the market,” its chief executive said. [65]

It never found a second act. In 2024-25 its revenue was Rs 24.6 crore, its net worth was negative by Rs 291 crore, and its accounts said it relies on guarantees and interest-free loans from its promoter, HCL Corporation, to meet its obligations. [10] In 2025-26 revenue fell again to Rs 21.6 crore, with a loss before tax of Rs 32.9 crore. [11] In August 2026 its auditor flagged doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. [66] The March 2025 gift gave her majority ownership of the promoter companies behind this business too. [59] What becomes of it is now a question for her.

The AI scare

The bigger setback is recent, and it is not HCL’s alone.

In July 2025 HCLTech reported a 9.7% fall in quarterly profit and cut its margin guidance to 17-18% from 18-19%. [67] In January 2026 it narrowed its growth forecast for the year to 4.0-4.5%, from 3-5%. [4][67] It then delivered 3.9%. [45] Reported net profit for 2025-26 was Rs 16,642 crore, down 4.3%, after a one-time charge linked to India’s new labour codes; before that charge it was Rs 17,361 crore, down 0.2%. For 2026-27 it guided to growth of 1-4%. The outlook reflected market volatility, weaker discretionary spending and ramp-downs at two or more clients, and the company said AI was deflating pricing by 2-3% a year; analysts at JPMorgan also pointed to cancelled SAP programmes. [68][3]

The market’s verdict was harsh. On 22 April 2026 the stock fell about 10% in a day. [68] On 30 June it touched a 52-week low of Rs 1,078, with the Nifty IT index nearly 42% below its December 2024 peak. [69] Reuters had reported in mid-February that fears about generative AI had wiped about US$50 billion off Indian IT stocks so far that month. [70] Fortune noted in May that HCLTech shares had lost more than a quarter of their value in 2026. [71]

Her Hurun wealth fell 2% over the year, and her rank slipped from third to fifth as Lakshmi Mittal and Cyrus Poonawalla, whose wealth rose 93% and 23%, moved past her. [21] There has been some repair since: profit for the April-June 2026 quarter rose 20% to Rs 4,624 crore. [72]

Her public position is that AI will help the company more than it hurts. “A lot of entry-level skills will get automated through AI, but the definition of entry-level will change,” she said at Jewar in February 2026. “So for us, AI is going to be a force multiplier.” [55] Whether she is right is the central question of her chairmanship, and nobody knows the answer yet.

Controversies and allegations

A note on scope first. We found no court order, regulatory finding or investigation by a major publication that makes an allegation against Roshni Nadar Malhotra personally. The matters below concern HCLTech, its American subsidiary, or an institution run by her family, during the years she has sat on the board (since 2013) or chaired it (since July 2020). She is not a party to any of the lawsuits described. [12][13][78][79]

H-1B wage allegations in the United States

Allegation: Three former HCL employees, Ralph Billington, Michael Aceves and Sharon Dorman, filed a whistleblower suit under the US False Claims Act in a federal court in Connecticut. They alleged that HCL underpaid workers on H-1B visas, which reduced the payroll taxes it owed, and used cheaper L-1 and B-1 visas for work that required H-1Bs. [12] In December 2021 the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, published a report by Ron Hira and Daniel Costa based on an internal HCL presentation that had entered the court record. It claimed that H-1B workers placed by HCL at American corporations “appear to have been underpaid by at least $95 million” a year, by the authors’ estimate, and asked the US Department of Labor to investigate. [15]

Response: HCL said: “HCL Technologies is strictly compliant with all relevant rules and regulations and is committed to pay wages to all employees in accordance with applicable laws.” [73]

What happened next:

• In July 2022 the district court dismissed the suit. [12]
• On 23 January 2025 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the dismissal. It held that the law the whistleblowers relied on requires an “established” obligation to pay the government, and that taxes are owed only on wages actually paid and visa fees only on applications actually filed. [12]
• The courts ruled on that legal question only. They made no finding on whether HCL had in fact underpaid anyone. [12]
• We found no public record of a Labor Department enforcement action following the think tank’s report.

Status: Dismissed, and the dismissal upheld on appeal in January 2025. We found no court or regulatory finding against HCL on the underlying wage claims.

Discrimination claims against HCL America

Allegation: There were two separate cases, pointing in opposite directions. In March 2019 Gregory Handloser filed a proposed class action in a California federal court alleging that HCL favoured South Asian workers and visa holders over others. The complaint said HCL had received 10,432 new H-1B visas in 2015-17 and that about 70% of its US workforce was South Asian. [77] Then, in August 2024, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued HCL America, alleging that in 2021 it had rejected a qualified applicant of Indian descent, then in his early sixties, for a sales director role because of his age and national origin. The EEOC said a hiring manager called him a “good guy, but he is too old” and asked recruiters for non-Indian candidates. [13]

Response: On the 2019 suit, HCL said it “takes pride in its employment practices, including the hiring and promotion of a diverse team”, and that 63% of its 15,000 US employees were hired locally. [77] The EEOC’s releases carry no statement from HCL America and do not say whether it admitted liability. [13][14]

What happened next:

• In September 2021 the parties in the Handloser case told the court they had reached a settlement in principle. The terms were not made public. [78]
• On 2 April 2026 the court approved a two-year consent decree in the EEOC case. HCL America agreed to pay US$495,000 to the applicant, have an outside consultant review its anti-discrimination policies, and train its recruiters and managers. [14]

Status: The Handloser parties reported a settlement in principle in September 2021, and the EEOC case ended in a consent decree that runs until about April 2028. Neither produced a court finding of discrimination.

Employee disputes in India: bonuses and attendance

Allegation: The IT employees’ union NITES has taken HCL’s pay practices to the government more than once. In January 2022 it filed a complaint saying the company was making employees who resigned repay performance bonuses already paid, in some cases up to Rs 1.7 lakh, and holding back relieving letters from those who refused. [73] In 2023 it called a change that made a previously fixed bonus depend on quarterly performance “unethical” and raised it with the labour ministry. [75] In July 2024 it called a reported rule linking leave to days spent in office “draconian and illegal”. [76]

Response: On the bonus recovery, HCL said the matter “has been incorrectly reported” and that it “follows the best HR practices”. [73] On the 2023 change, it said it had paid the bonus in full during the pandemic as an exception and was “reverting to the original policy”. [75] On attendance, it said its hybrid policy asks middle and senior managers to work from office three days a week. [76]

What happened next:

• In January 2022 HCL said it had waived recovery of one of the two bonuses with effect from 22 December 2021. NITES called it a first step and said it would keep pressing on the other. [74]
• We found no report that the 2023 bonus change or the 2024 attendance rule was withdrawn.

Status: These remain disputes between a union and the company. As of 1 October 2026 we found no public record of an order against HCLTech by a labour authority in any of them.

The MillerCoors lawsuit

Allegation: In March 2017 the American brewer MillerCoors sued HCL Technologies and HCL America in a federal court in Illinois for US$100 million over a troubled SAP software project. It alleged that HCL failed to staff the project adequately or keep it on schedule. [79]

Response: HCL countered that the brewer was using it as a “convenient scapegoat to shield its own leadership from blame”. [80]

Status: Settled in 2018. The case was “dismissed without any finding or determination by the court of any issue either for or against any of the parties”, and the terms were not disclosed. [80] She was a non-executive director at the time. [1]

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and a dismissed employee

Allegation: By early July 2023 the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, one of the Shiv Nadar Foundation’s institutions, had dismissed Sandip K. Luis, its manager of curatorial research and publications. [16] In May he had written a Facebook post criticising an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art that marked the 100th episode of the Prime Minister’s radio programme, and Kiran Nadar’s association with it. More than 500 artists and academics signed a statement supporting him, which said he had been terminated “in a highly opaque manner” after the post, and the Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam withdrew a show planned at the museum. [81][82]

Response: Neither report carries a statement from the museum explaining the dismissal. The Art Newspaper quoted the gallerist Peter Nagy defending Kiran Nadar: “no one has done more to support the progressive and serious art forms of India in the past decade.” [82]

Status: No litigation and no reinstatement have been reported. Roshni Nadar Malhotra is a trustee of the foundation but was not named in the coverage.

As of 1 October 2026, we found no court or regulatory finding against HCLTech’s chairperson in any of these matters. Of the three American cases that concluded during her time in the chair, one was dismissed and the dismissal upheld on appeal, one ended in a confidential settlement, and one in a US$495,000 consent decree.

Giving back

On Hurun’s latest philanthropy list, no family in India gave more than the Nadars, and none came close. The EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List 2025 put Shiv Nadar and family first with Rs 2,708 crore donated in 2024-25, about Rs 7.4 crore a day. The Ambani family, second, gave Rs 626 crore. [83] TIME, naming Shiv Nadar to its 2026 philanthropy list, put his lifetime giving at US$1.7 billion. [84]

The vehicle is the Shiv Nadar Foundation, set up in 1994, which says it has invested more than US$1.85 billion in seven institutions: SSN College of Engineering, VidyaGyan, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, two Shiv Nadar universities, the Shiv Nadar Schools and the Shiksha Initiative. [16] Roshni is a trustee. [8]

The family calls its method “creative philanthropy”: building institutions meant to outlast the givers, not writing cheques to fix one problem at a time. [16] She explained the difference in 2015. She pointed to “philanthropists like the Carnegies or the Rockefellers”, who built institutions, and contrasted that with “a corrective approach to philanthropy that, say, the Gates Foundation pursues”. And: “The whole premise of the Foundation is that the institutions that we create and the Foundation itself should last beyond the lifetimes of the founder and family members.” [28]

VidyaGyan is the project she is most closely identified with. It now runs residential campuses at Bulandshahr and Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh, lists a third in Chennai, receives more than 2.5 lakh applications a year, and has over 1,600 students and 2,400 alumni. [17]

One of them is Manu Chauhan. He grew up in Akrabad, a village of about 6,000 people in Aligarh district, the son of an insurance salesman, and studied in the village government school until Class 5. In 2021, after VidyaGyan, he won a full scholarship to Stanford. “I want to make this process easier for children of my village,” he told ThePrint. [85]

Her second cause is wildlife. In 2018 she and her husband founded The Habitats Trust. In August 2026 it announced its ninth round of grants: Rs 3.3 crore to six conservation projects, taking the total to 38 projects and more than Rs 16.2 crore. Its focus is the animals nobody puts on a poster. “India’s biodiversity is far beyond its iconic wildlife,” she said. [86] She sits on the global board of The Nature Conservancy and has produced a television series on endangered Indian species. [19]

She has set herself a deadline. Her aim, she said in 2022, is “by the time I am 55, through The Habitats Trust, be able to save some species from extinction.” [24]

Recognition has followed. France made her a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in July 2024. [7] Kellogg gave her its Schaffner Award in 2023. [18] Forbes ranked her 76th among the world’s most powerful women in 2025, and Fortune placed her 33rd on its 2026 list. [87][71]

Succession

Succession at HCL is largely settled, and it was done in public, in steps: vice-chairperson in 2018, the chair in 2020, the founder off the board in 2021, the regulator’s clearance in 2024, and majority ownership in 2025. [32][34][57][59]

Shiv Nadar is 81. He holds 4% of each holding company, and HCLTech still lists him as chairman emeritus and strategic adviser to the board. [38][59][8]

The family’s presence now rests on two people. Roshni chairs HCLTech and the group. Shikhar Malhotra sits on the HCLTech board, leads HCL Capital, the group’s investment arm, chairs the chip joint venture with Foxconn and is chancellor of Shiv Nadar University. [8] Operations stay with a professional chief executive, as they have since before she arrived.

She is 45. No further succession plan has been announced. What she has said is about the present: “I haven’t done enough yet for the world to remember me, the best is yet to come.” [26]

What their journey teaches

An inheritance is a job, and it needs an apprenticeship. She became CEO of the holding company in 2009, took the chair in 2020 and got control in 2025. That is sixteen years of sitting in rooms, asking questions and running the foundation before the shares moved. Families who hand over the title and the ownership on the same day skip the part that makes it work.

You can lead experts without being one, if you ask the plain question. “Why don’t you just say the full form?” is a good line for any boardroom. She has never pretended to be an engineer. Her role, as the company described it when she took the chair, is governance and oversight, with professional managers running the business.

Decide early who owns and who runs. HCL had professional CEOs long before the handover, and the founder left the board a year after giving up the chair. When the chair changed hands in 2020, the chief executive could say, “I do not see any change”. [32]

Do the paperwork early, and in public. The regulator’s exemption came first, then the gift deeds, and the stock exchange was told the reason in one sentence. A succession carried out by the founder himself, with the regulator’s clearance, leaves little to dispute later.

Control does not protect you from your industry. The promoter group she heads holds about 60.8% of HCLTech with no shares pledged, and her fortune still fell when the market decided AI was a threat to IT services. A fortune that rests on one listed company moves with that company. Ownership gives you the right to decide; it does not shield you from the consequences.

Give in a way that outlasts you. The Nadars’ largest gifts are not donations but schools, universities and a museum that need running every year. It is slower and harder than writing cheques, and it is the part of the family’s work that a village boy at Stanford can point to.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 1 October 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.

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