Gender in the Job: An Interview with Harjinder Kaur, MD and CEO of Comvision Pvt Ltd
Business Digest India May 2018
Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was about the comfort of women with power and the comfort of women as leaders. Five years after the publication of the landmark book we wanted to assess if the situation has changed so we spoke with Harjinder Kaur, MD and CEO of Comvision Pvt Ltd, in Hyderabad, who broke the glass ceiling to start an IT solutions company in 1995. Since then she has diversified into e-toll integrated solutions, RFID based Tags implementation for Highways, e-governance & large scale system integration, intelligent traffic /transport solutions for Smart City Implementation; again the only woman doing this in India
Q: You, as a woman, have been a pioneer in your field of work. Tell us about Comvision’s journey.
I started the company in 1995 in Delhi. We started by conducting IT specialised trainings. I come from a small town, but my dad always encouraged me to do something. Women need that kind of encouragement. In those days, this support was even more necessary as there were very few women in business and in IT sector it was even more difficult to find them. Post marriage, I started the business in Hyderabad. The Government of Andhra Pradesh was our biggest buyer because the corporates were only in Delhi and Mumbai. I was very focused. I delivered even when some tough projects came my way. My team was my strength. We would always sit together and brainstorm. Also, the attitude of Andhra Pradesh government was very forthcoming. Their tender conditions did not have prerequisites. They asked for proof of concept (POC) if you were successful in POC they would give the project to you. Hence, a lot of MSME sector came to the forefront. We could give some turnkey projects to the AP government.
Read on…….