Why Corporate America's Boardrooms Are Becoming More Indian Than Ever

After decades of climbing the executive ranks at US companies, more men of Indian descent are now entering the boardroom.  A record 16 Indian men joined S&P 500 boards this year, taking directorships at companies including Walmart Inc., Southwest Airlines Co. and Western Digital Corp., according to ISS-Corporate and data provider Equilar. Only White men and women added more seats. 

The surge caps a longer shift. The share of Indian men among directors at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies has tripled since 2018, outpacing increases for women, Black and Hispanic directors, according to data from James Drury Partners.

The boardroom gains come as companies put increased emphasis on directors with chief executive officer or operating experience - credentials that many Indian business leaders have accumulated after decades in the US, according to recruiters and the executives themselves. Of the 184 Indian men on Fortune 500 and S&P 500 boards, 77 per cent have operating, or so-called profit-and-loss, backgrounds, the James Drury data show. Roughly two-thirds have held CEO roles.

That same pattern is evident among this year's directors, where two-thirds are current or former CEOs. They include top executives at Stryker Corp. and Linde Plc and the recently retired CEO of Albertsons Cos.

The gains come as companies pull back from diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Even so, boards are continuing to change, with Indian men making particularly rapid inroads.

Indian men now lead roughly a dozen blue-chip companies, including Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Procter & Gamble Co., underscoring their growing presence in the highest ranks of corporate America.

Indian women, like women more broadly, haven't seen the same progress in recent years, in part because they're less likely to have served as CEOs. There are notable exceptions. Former PepsiCo Inc. CEO Indra K. Nooyi and former Gap Inc. CEO Sonia Syngal joined the boards of Honeywell International Inc. and Tractor Supply Inc., respectively, this year.

Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam Software Corp., was added to the board of technology company F5 Inc. in April. For Eswaran, 53, who came to the US more than three decades ago from India, each generation of Indian executives is building on gains made by earlier groups of workers who arrived after immigration rules were relaxed in the 1960s. 

To get to America, the aspiring executives had to compete with millions of their countrymen for spots at the best schools, Eswaran said. They advanced from entry-level jobs to operational roles as they proved their mettle. The first big company CEOs in the late 1990s opened up opportunities that have been widening ever since, he said.

"Those are massive filters," Eswaran said. "You get people who are sort of comfortable with risk and probably pretty hard to rattle."

One of the early pioneers was Raj Gupta, who in 1999 was appointed CEO of a Fortune 500 company when he took over specialty-chemical maker Rohm and Haas Co. He was only the third CEO of Indian heritage in the Fortune 500 at that time. His career includes work on 15 public boards, including HP Inc. and DuPont de Nemours Inc., and seven private boards.

Gupta said his first board stint came at a specialty-gas company in Philadelphia when he was still among the candidates to become CEO of Rohm and Haas. His boss at the time said it would be valuable experience for his eventual promotion. Now 80, Gupta said his board service years are done and he's currently teaching future business leaders at Wharton and Harvard.

Gupta said early mentors helped him transition from employee to leader, advising him, for example, to speak up more in meetings rather than save his best ideas for private conversations.

"The mindset was, if I continue to perform well relative to my peers, I'll be recognized and I'll be promoted," he said. "But I think the recognition of understanding was that your softer skills, influencer skills, listening ability, after you reach a certain level, are more important."

The career trajectory of many of today's Indian business leaders is similar to that of Rakesh Sachdev. He started in the US as a senior engineer at auto supplier Cummins Inc. in 1981 before rising to become chief financial officer and later president of Asia Pacific at Arvin Meritor Inc.

During the financial crisis in 2008 he left the auto industry for biotech company Sigma-Aldrich Corp. where he rose from CFO to CEO in 2010 and later sold the company before taking another CEO role. He's currently the chair of paint maker Axalta Coating Systems Ltd., which plans to merge with Dutch paint company Akzo Nobel NV later this year. He says he will be the chair of the new company.

Sachdev, 70, said he's helped recruit Indian executives to boards and increasingly sees them included on slates of potential directors for boards on which he serves.

"It has gained momentum because Indians have done well in their professional careers and that has made them more valuable as board members," he said.

Focus on the success of Indian men shouldn't overlook the less positive reality for the broader population of Asian men and women, said Norman Chen, CEO of the Asian American Foundation, which advocates for Asian and Pacific Islanders in the US. Other members of the Asian community are under-represented on boards, which some researchers have described as a "bamboo ceiling" for East Asian executives, he said. His group is working on programs to help all Asian directors find more opportunities, he said.

The path taken by many Indian business leaders is becoming harder to replicate as the Trump administration tightens immigration restrictions, including on the H-1B visa program widely used by Indian workers in technical and medical fields. The administration has imposed a $100,000 payment requirement on employers seeking to bring certain H-1B workers into the US, a measure facing a court challenge, and has proposed a separate plan with similar fees. Indian-born workers accounted for about 71 per cent of approved H-1B petitions in fiscal 2024, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Most of the top Indian CEOs in the US, including those running giant global companies, came on student visas and later worked with H-1B visas and are now making significant contributions to the American economy, said Sanjeev Joshipura, executive director of Indiaspora, a group that advocates for the Indian community in the US and elsewhere. Student visas are already on the decline, he said.

"The rules shouldn't be made in a way that prevents America from continuing to be the primary magnet for the best talent all over the world," he said.

To some degree, Indians have an advantage in adapting to US business challenges because the fractured nature of India itself presents a good training ground for leadership traits that work for immigrant leaders in the US, Veeam's Eswaran said. Many Indians grow up accustomed to navigating linguistic and cultural differences within their own country, where crossing a state line can mean encountering a different language and set of social norms, he said. 

"You learn that the person sitting next to you is often working from a very different set of assumptions and nothing gets done unless you account for it," Eswaran said. "That also fundamentally shapes how you lead, and that makes a difference."

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)