NAINA LAL KIDWAI AND Sulaja Firodia Motwani are the latest in a growing list of Indian women who have been selected winners of a broad range of awards for corporate excellence worldwide. Naina Lal Kidwai, who heads HSBC’s investment banking business in India, has been selected by TIME magazine and CNN as one of the global influentials for the year 2002.

Kidwai is part of a list of 15 up and comers who have achieved corporate excellence that transcends borders. TIME hailed Kidwai, 45, as a shrewd negotiator with a talent for anticipating new sectors of growth.

Kidwai also has the honor of being the first Indian woman to graduate from Harvard Business School in 1982. She began at Morgan Stanley, which she joined in 1994 after a stint at ANZ Grindlay's Bank. At the time, Morgan Stanley's operations in India were relatively small, and she engineered a joint venture with investment bank JM Financials, making the resulting firm one of the largest in that industry in India.

The magazine said she also aggressively pursued opportunities in technology, winning the accounts of Wipro and Infosys, among others, and brokered a joint venture between AT&T and the Birla and Tata families, to create the biggest merger in Indian corporate history.

Motwani, joint managing director of Kinetic Engineering Limited, was named one of the Global Leaders of tomorrow for steering her company, Kinetic Engineering to the forefront of excellence.

Members of the WEF nominate people who are below 37 years, hold positions of considerable influence and responsibility and have demonstrated their capacity to shape the future agenda of their communities and countries. The final list tries to represent regions and genders as well as areas of activity. In the 2003 WEF list, there are 60 men and 40 women.