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Summary
Lila Poonawalla's story is a masterclass in resilience and leadership.
Few Indian women have stormed the male bastion of manufacturing as forcefully as Lila Poonawalla. She managed this feat not in the diversity-conscious 2020s, but through the gritty, grease-stained decades of the 1970s and 80s, an era when women were expected to grace the arts or, at most, the perceived soft corridors of HR or marketing.
In 1967, among the first women to graduate in mechanical engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP), Poonawalla was a statistical anomaly. Even today, women occupy around 20% of the seats in the premier IITs, with branches like mechanical and civil engineering remaining overwhelmingly male. The numbers in the corner office are even bleaker, with the manufacturing sector continuing to be a male fortress. Of the top 100 manufacturing companies in India today, only a handful are headed by women who reached those heights without the leverage of a family name.
Refugee’s hunger
Born to a Sindhi Amil family in Hyderabad (Sindh) in 1944, Lila Thadani’s steel was forged in the harsh kiln of partition. Arriving in India as a fatherless refugee at age three, she grew up in difficult conditions in Pune, supported by a papad-selling and tiffin packer mother who was the sole breadwinner. This early displacement stripped away any sense of entitlement, replacing it with what is often called a refugee’s hunger, that survivalist drive she shared with other self-made titans of that era, from Raunaq Singh to the Munjals.
When she applied for a job at Vulcan Laval (later Alfa Laval) in 1967, she was told the company did not even have facilities for women. Her response was typical: she did not demand a bathroom but just asked for a desk, promising she would not let biology interfere with the business of engineering.
The Swiss company took a bet on her resilience. One time, she was moved to maintenance and asked to look after the gardens. That year, Alfa Laval won the best garden prize in Pune. As for those bathrooms, she soon placed liquid soap in the men's bathrooms while inspecting them with the union members.
When she took charge of the company, she was hit by a union strike. The Swiss owners said they didn't mind shutting shop. Poonawalla negotiated a five-year agreement by asking the union leader to sit in the manager's chair and see how many demands he could then afford.
Not one to blend into the background, she possessed a formidable presence in her crisp, elegant saris, matched with high-collared blouses. She would hit the shop floor at 4am when needed and expected others, men and women, to do the same.
Under her tenure as chairman and managing director starting in 1987, Alfa Laval India became one of the strongest-performing subsidiaries for its Swedish parent. She grew the business fivefold, navigating the maddening License Permit Raj to turn the India operations into a global export hub for specialized dairy and food processing equipment.
In 1983, when the Institute of Marketing and Management awarded her the Marketing Man of the Year award, it was a telling marker of how the establishment still framed success.
A partnership of equals
Her marriage to her boss Firoz Poonawalla was a partnership of equals that defied the strict patriarchy of the time. While they chose not to have biological children, that decision arguably fueled one of the more impactful employment-focused initiatives in India.
In 2001, Poonawalla stepped away from the corporate machinery to re-engineer her life. In the rich tradition of Parsi philanthropy, she and Firoz turned their personal wealth into the Lila Poonawalla Foundation. On her 50th birthday, her company wanted to gift her a car or a Swiss gold watch studded with diamonds. Her husband told them a lump sum of money would be more useful for her plan to set up a foundation to empower girls, her way of returning a favour since her own education had been funded by the kindness of people. The company agreed, and with the money, she set up a foundation which has since supported over 17,000 Lila Fellows, underprivileged young women pursuing engineering, medicine and nursing.
At 81, Lila Poonawalla shows little inclination to slow down. The shop floors she once had to fight to enter have given way to classrooms and careers for thousands of young women. In their journeys lies her most enduring act of disruption.
English (US) ·