Savitri Jindal

Savitri Jindal was born in Assandh, in the Indian state of Haryana, in 1950, and married Om Prakash Jindal, a first-generation industrialist who had built a small steel-pipe workshop into the OP Jindal Group, spanning steel, power and mining. Like many Indian businessmen's wives of her generation, she was not formally involved in running the companies, focusing instead on the family and household while her husband expanded the business over four decades.

In March 2005, Om Prakash Jindal was killed in a helicopter crash while flying to inspect a steel plant. With no succession plan finalised among their four sons, the family turned to Savitri Jindal, then fifty-five, to take the chairperson's role and hold the group together while the sons negotiated how to divide its businesses. She had no formal training in steel or power and was, by her own account, thrust into the position by circumstance rather than ambition.

Under her nominal leadership the group's combined businesses, later split into separately run companies for each son, continued to expand, and for a period she was ranked among the wealthiest women in Asia by net worth tied to the family's shareholdings. She also entered politics, serving as a state minister in Haryana and later as a member of the state legislature.

She has generally kept a low public profile compared with her sons, who run the operating companies, but her decision to step into the chairperson's role at a moment of sudden crisis is widely credited with preventing the group from fracturing immediately after her husband's death.