She chairs HCL, the technology group her father Shiv Nadar founded. That makes Roshni Nadar Malhotra one of the most powerful women in Indian business, and one of the first to lead a major listed Indian IT company at all.

Inherited chairs are often ceremonial. This one is not. She has been active in the group's governance and strategy, steering a company that competes globally across IT services, software and engineering — a business with no tolerance for a figurehead at the top.

Inheriting an empire is easy to announce and hard to earn. She set out to earn it.

The Shiv Nadar Foundation is the other half of the work. Money into education and the arts, and institutions built to keep running long after whoever funded them has moved on.

Her visibility matters in an industry where women are still scarce at the top table. Running a family empire while holding a distinct public position on education and conservation is a model of Indian corporate leadership that did not really exist before.

Born in Delhi in 1982, Roshni Nadar studied communication at Northwestern University and took an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management. She worked as a news producer in London and the United States before joining HCL, and within about a year was executive director and chief executive of HCL Corporation, the group's holding company. She became chairperson of HCL Technologies in July 2020, when her father stepped back.

In March 2025 Shiv Nadar gifted her a large part of his stake in the family's promoter companies, making her the controlling shareholder of the group. The move settled the succession question that hangs over most Indian family businesses, and placed one of the country's largest technology fortunes in her hands.

Outside the company she has built a separate public profile in conservation. The Habitats Trust, which she founded in 2018, funds work to protect India's natural habitats and native species. Through the Shiv Nadar Foundation she is also closely involved with Shiv Nadar University and the VidyaGyan schools, which offer free residential education to academically gifted children from rural Uttar Pradesh.