'Wow' women behind successful IT icons

BANGALORE, INDIA: Their high-flying IT honcho husbands might be better recognized than them by the world. But, it's not for nothing these wives are known as the better halves.

They are women of their own standing, notwithstanding their illustrious life partners' achievements and accolades. Moreover, they have taken up the dual responsibility of 'managing' their spouse's rise, too.

As internationally-acclaimed venture capitalist of Indian origin, Vinod Khosla, once remarked, "I have often been introduced as Neeru's husband." And, Vinod is proud.

On International Women's Day, CIOL highlights five such ladies, who were not only behind their successful men, but also made a mark themselves in the field of their choice.

Neeru Khosla

Back in 2006, Neeru co-founded the CK-12 Foundation that aims to develop open source textbooks and lower the cost of education in the U.S. and the rest of the world. She is the chair of the non-profit organization located in Palo Alto and has been working to create collaborative text books.

CK-12 offers free downloadable FlexBooks, a digital textbook that can be modified and adapted to serve whatever students and teachers need. These are online digital textbooks in primarily math and science, and exercises that are customizable, with videos and other interactive features.

She, along with husband Vinod, has donated $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. Neeru was appointed on the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board in 2008.

Sudha Murty

A multi-faceted personality, Sudha dabbles in fiction writing, social welfare work, philanthropic activities and rural education.

Sudha's books reflect, apart from life in India, her ideals and ideas on a range of contemporary issues. Her works include How I Taught My Grandmother to Read, Old Man and His God, Gently Falls The Bakula, Dollar Sose and The Accolades Galore.

Interestingly, she was the first computer engineer to be employed in Tata Motors and was behind an initiative to take computer and library facility to all schools in Karnataka. How N.R. Narayanamurthy founded Infosys with Rs 10,000 she offered is the stuff of legend.

A member of the public healthcare initiative of the Gates Foundation, Sudha has set up several orphanages and been a part of rural development efforts. In 2006, she was given the prestigious Padma Shri award by the Indian government.

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Reva Nayyar

Reva Nayyar has put behind her bureaucratic days to be involved with the ministry of woman and child development and, of course, continue to be a great support to Vineet Nayyar, chief executive of Tech Mahindra.

In her capacity, she has been instrumental in enactment of several policies and legislation pertaining to women and child welfare.

A Delhi-based charitable organization, the Essel Social Welfare Foundation, is run by Reva. It is an umbrella organization to many other NGOs that supports education of underprivileged children, including the girl child and the visually handicapped.

Kiran Nadar

Also, HCL founder Shiv Nadar's wife, Kiran has taken up educational initiatives through SSN group of institutions, Vidya Gyan and the Shiv Nadar University. Based in Chennai, the university is considered one of the best in south India.

Kiran is also closely working with the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation that sponsors the education of economically poor Muslim girls in the backward districts of Uttar Pradesh. She was featured on the '48 Heroes of Philanthropy' list of Forbes in 2010.

She was one of the founders of NIIT and handled the marketing and communication initiatives of the company. Later, she started collecting art works by upcoming artists in a way to give them a fillip and launched last year the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi. It is said to be India's first philanthropic museum, which was followed by another in Noida.

Rohini Nilekani

While UIDAI chairman Nandan is busy devising strategies for the Unique Identification project, Rohini Nilekani is quietly running Arghyam, an organization that helps provide solutions to the water crisis in draught-prone regions across India.

Arghyam was set up with a private endowment in 2001 and continues to serve lakhs of people in various parts of the country.

An ex-journalist, writer and philanthropist, Rohini founded in 2002 the Akshara Foundation, the goal of which is 'Every child in school and learning well'. It is a public charitable trust that helped improve the quality of education every child who is less privileged. About 3,50,000 students in Karnataka have benefited from the foundation.

She has also co-founded Pratham Books, a non-profit publishing house to produce high quality, low-cost books for children in several Indian languages.