Rupshikha Saikia Borah takes charge as the first lady director of Oil India Limited

Mrs Bora receiving award for the Woman of the Year (file photo) 

GLASS ceiling is being slowly broken in India’s corporate world with more female candidates occupying some key posts at the top level. While Arundhati Bhattacharya is all set to take charge as the first female managing director of India’s largest public sector bank, State Bank of India, Rupshikha Saikia Borah has become the first...

lady functional director on the board of Oil India Limited (OIL). She has recently taken over as director (finance) of this Navaratna company — the nation’s second biggest state-owned exploration and production firm. She is also the first woman Chartered Accountant from the North-East India. A brilliant student she completed her post graduate in Commerce from Delhi School of Economics.

Rupshikha received prestigious Fulbright Hubert Humphrey Fellowship, USA.  Interestingly, Rupshikha is the wife of former OIL CMD NM Borah, who was responsible for Oil India’s foray into international exploration activities. With vast experience in the oil and gas exploration and production industry, he joined Oil India Board on May 6, 2004 as director (operations) and was elevated to the position of CMD in 2008. Under his leadership, Oil India Limited had been on a constant growth path and through induction of state-of-the-art and fit for purpose technology, had achieved record growth in production. In fact, he gave OIL a brand new corporate image. No doubt, her family background and the impact of her husband will come handy for this woman of substance in handling the affairs of the company.  In the year 2009, Mrs Borah received the special commendation award for Woman of the Year in The Oil & Gas Industry. She was then functioning as a general manager (Treasury) of the PSU. Mrs Borah has over 27 years of experience in diverse fields of financial management, audit, treasury, corporate finance and strategic planning and it will be interesting to see how far this lady succeeds in making her mark in the PSU.