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Compliance to leadership: India's boardroom opportunity
This article is authored by Rhea Mazumdar Singhal, partnerships lead, The Udaiti Foundation and Ajay Khanna, co-founder, Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI).
Walk into any boardroom today and you will notice her almost immediately. She is there – present, accomplished, and occasionally, visibly peripheral.
In 2013, India opened the door. It required every listed company to have a woman on its board. Women now hold 22% of seats across listed India, up from near-zero. What happened inside those rooms is a more complicated story.
Many boards met the mandate through familiar circles – family members, affiliates, trusted insiders. The 2018 Uday Kotak revision attempted to close this loophole, requiring independent women directors across India's 2,000 largest companies. The numbers followed: 73% of NSE-listed companies now have at least one, bringing the average to 1.03.
Presence and influence are different things. Only 11% of women directors hold executive roles, against 65% of men, and the more telling signal lies in committee placement. Audit committees, risk panels, nomination and remuneration boards: These are the rooms within the room, where capital is allocated, CEO performance scrutinised, and the real texture of governance determined. In most Indian boardrooms, they remain overwhelmingly male. As one independent director navigating these dynamics put it: "You can have a seat, but that doesn't mean you get a say.”
As India continues to position itself as a destination for global capital, a $30-trillion economy in the making, it is entering an era of compressed accountability, climate disclosures, supply chain scrutiny, AI-related risk, geopolitical exposure. These are not problems that homogenous thinking handles well.
MSCI (2025) finds that women on audit and risk committees strengthen oversight, while Deloitte associates women-chaired committees with greater investor confidence. The financial case is equally compelling: McKinsey finds that gender-diverse executive teams consistently outperform their peers; the Peterson Institute estimates that 30% female leadership can boost profitability by 15%; and the IFC reports 33% higher ROE at banks where women hold at least 15% of senior roles.
What would genuine progress look like?
Starting with a phased pathway to critical mass, 25% representation across the Nifty 1000 by 2027, and 30% by 2030 would bring India to the global average within this decade. The regulatory infrastructure already exists. It simply needs to be pointed at a bolder destination. The precedents are encouraging: Norway's 2003 quota moved women's share of boards from 5% to 40% in six years. France, now the global leader at 46%, followed with binding targets and enforcement that meant something.
The second step is moving the conversation from visibility to influence. Representation on a board means little if it is concentrated in low-stakes committees. Mandatory disclosure of committee composition by gender – modelled on the UK's FCA Listing Rules – would create the kind of reputational accountability that moves behaviour faster than regulation alone. Which committees do women chair? Where are they concentrated? Investors and proxy advisers increasingly want these answers.
The third, and perhaps most structurally important step, is treating the pipeline as a governance risk. Women represent about 33% of entry-level employees in corporate India. By key management positions, that share has fallen to 18%. The path to the boardroom runs through mid-management, and that is precisely where it narrows.
SEBI's Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report should require gender-disaggregated data at every level, not just the board, alongside a published pipeline action plan. Without mid-management targets, board diversity will remain cosmetic, replenished by the same small pool of familiar names rotating across the same seats.
The fourth step is moving the baseline mandate to a minimum of two women directors – a change that would force a deeper draw on the talent pool and push boards beyond tokenism. But representation alone is not enough; diversity must become a market signal. Right now, a company that appoints one woman and one that appoints five are treated identically by the market: no premium, no recognition, no signal that ambition on this front is worth anything. An enhanced governance index privileging companies that cross the 30% threshold would change that, linking diversity to ESG premium and index inclusion. India Inc. follows incentives. Give it the right ones.
Finally, the sector gaps deserve honest attention. For construction, oil and gas, mining and utilities, female representation in senior roles still falls below 10%. Public sector undertakings, owned by the very government that legislates board diversity, must be held to the same standard as private firms. State ownership is not a shield from this expectation. It is, if anything, a reason for higher ones.
India's governance story is one of genuine momentum, and it is worth pausing to recognise how it was built. Someone fought for the 2013 mandate. Someone pushed for the 2018 revision. And somewhere in a boardroom right now, a woman is asking the question that changes the direction of a decision, because she is finally in the room where it gets made.
That progress deserves acknowledgment. And deserves to be pushed further; 30% by 2030, not as a statistic, but as a room. More voices around the table, better decisions leaving it. Countries that got there will tell you the hardest part was simply deciding to try. India has already done the harder thing. It started. The next move is to finish what was begun.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Rhea Mazumdar Singhal, partnerships lead, The Udaiti Foundation and Ajay Khanna, co-founder, Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI).
