Rajshree Pathy, is an eminent entrepreneur from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India.

She is the
Chairperson and Managing Director of the Rajshree Group of Companies and Founder of India
Design Forum.[1] The Rajshree group has varied interests - Food and Agro business, Energy,
Travel, Health and Hospitality and Arts. She also promotes performing arts and contemporary art
movement in Coimbatore through the Contemplate Art Gallery and COCCA.

Contents

1 Background

2 Company

3 Activities

4 Awards and Recognition

5 References

Background
Rajshree Pathy is the daughter of famous industrialist Shri G. Varadaraj, of PSG Families
engaged in Charities and Educational Institutions for more than a century. Her father was also a
former Rajya Sabha MP. She is married to S.Pathy, Chairman & Managing director of Lakshmi
Mills.

Company
Rajshree Sugars and Chemicals Ltd. is a company with interests across integrated fields such as
Sugar, Distillery, Power Co-Generation and Biotechnology. The range of products include White
Crystal Sugar, Alcohol, Organic Manure, Bio-products and Power. A speciality Demerara Sugar
is marketed under the brand name RSCL Sugar Brown. RSCL with its Corporate office in
Coimbatore, has three modern sugar-manufacturing units located in Tamil Nadu one at Varadaraj
Nagar, Theni District, the second at Mundiampakkam, Villupuram District and the third at
Gingee, Villupuram District. RSCL also has a Sugar factory located at Zaheerabad, Medak
District in Andhra Pradesh.

Activities
Rajshree Pathy inherited her father's business, following his death in 1992. She has been looking
after the business since then.
She is the Founder Director of the Coimbatore Center for Contemporary Art (CoCCA) and the
Contemplate Art Gallery.

She is the Founder of The India Design Forum (IDF). IDF is the first International design
platform that will be held annually in India, by bringing together global design thought leaders to
enable strategic alliances, encourage dialogue between academia & industry and facilitate cross
cultural design thinking and application.

Awards and Recognition

She has been awarded with several distinctions at the national and global level and has
consistently been included and lauded in many compendiums of business leaders.
In 1996, Rajshree Pathy received the Global Leaders of Tomorrow recognition from the World
Economic Forum, Davos (Switzerland). She was awarded the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship
in 2000. She has been the President of Indian Sugar Mills Association from 2004 to 2005. She
was the Chairperson of CII National Committee on Textiles from 1996 to 1999. She has been
conferred with the prestigious Padma Shri Award in the field of Trade and Industry by the
Government of India, in the year 2013.

Rajshree pathy
She's neither a rah-rah feminist railing against glass ceilings, nor a retiring housewife, jasminestudded oiled hair hanging down her back and a nominal interest in business.
Rajshree Pathy, a non-conformist all her life, is proud to be a small-town entrepreneur with big
ambitions (she runs the Coimbatore-based Rajshree Sugars and Chemicals Limited, a company
with interests across integrated fields such as sugar, distillery, power co-generation and
biotechnology), but is obsessed about "doing the right thing".

That, of course, is the spirit behind her suit against Axis Bank for selling her company an exotic
derivative hedge against forex losses -- Pathy's plaint, as well as that of others who've filed suits
against the banks, is that they never understood the complex products they were sold but bought
them in good faith. Estimates of the potential loss from such products, primarily in the SME
sector, range from $3bn to $5bn, a figure large enough to wipe out many of those who bought
these products.

Pathy defied a feudal family setup to become a professional woman. She became first woman
president of the powerful Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) in 2004-05.
She is currently the president of the South India Sugar Mills Association (SISMA) for a second
term, from 2007 to 2009. She was named Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic
Forum at Davos in 1996.
Pathy is best known for her sponsorship and lobbying for the ethanol blending programme and
under her presidentship, ISMA signed a tripartite agreement binding oil companies and sugar
factories all over the country. Once the petroleum ministry bought her idea of blending petrol
with 5 per cent ethanol, this forced all constituents to a common table.
But it is all the controls imposed by government on the sugar industry that consumes Pathy. She
has some pertinent questions. When 67 per cent of all sugar is consumed by institutional buyers
like soft drinks manufacturers, food manufacturers, the pharma industry, and so on; 20 per cent
by average middle class households; and 10 per cent by the Public Distribution System, why
should the sugar industry be forced to subsidise consumers? "We support the largest segment of
organised industry-aided farming. Why is the government not supporting this industry?" she
asks.
The industry is also up in arms against the very high weight of sugar in the WPI, which makes it
the single most sensitive commodity supposedly contributing to inflation. "This needs to be
urgently revisited as this figure is not relevant today -- the basket has widened," Pathy says.
She predicts that unless sugar prices are allowed to stay at realistic rates based upon the current
sugarcane pricing of both the central and state governments, the industry will die and India will
have to import sugar in future.
Pathy has a range of other interests: art, wellness, music and the revival of traditional craft, and
her family's spirit of philanthropy. Delhi fascinates but also irritates her.
"Power is really about giving it away for a larger purpose," she says, but Delhi's self-absorption
angers her. "The news you read about in Coimbatore? Well, if you're in Delhi you're part of those
who make it," she says.
Pathy dreams of the day India can compete with sugar producers like Brazil where sugar
producers don't have to ask government permission each they want to add to capacity.
With her, the personal is the political: "never put curbs, never exploit a handicap," she says