Chairperson, Rajshree Sugars & Chemicals | Took charge 1990 | Coimbatore
In October 1990, Rajshree Pathy lost her father. She was 34, a mother, and had joined his young sugar company only the year before. Within months, her mother had fallen ill too. “Overnight, I had no father, no mother, just a bunch of sugar companies I had to run,” she told Business Standard in 2005.
The larger sugar companies in Tamil Nadu expected her to sell. She did not. Instead, she built the mill into an integrated sugar, alcohol and power business, became the first woman to lead the Indian Sugar Mills Association, and later turned her attention to design, art and Ayurveda. This is the story of how that happened.
A creative child in an industrial family
Rajshree was born in Coimbatore on 15 April 1956, into the PSG family, one of the city’s best-known industrial and philanthropic families, with interests in textiles, sugar and education. She went to Stanes Anglo Indian High School.
She grew up in a house full of art, antiques and books on design and architecture. “My mother was exceptionally creative,” she told Outlook Business in 2012. She dreamed of becoming an architect and wanted to study art and architecture at the JJ School in Bombay, but, according to Business Standard, her mother tearfully begged her not to leave Coimbatore, and she stayed. At 17, she bought her first painting, an oil on canvas by MF Husain, for ₹18,000.
She studied commerce at Avinashilingam college in Coimbatore. In her second year, at 17 and a half, she married S. Pathy of the Lakshmi Mills family, another Coimbatore textile house. “The PSG family produces girls, the Laxmi Mills family produces boys,” she joked to Business Standard.
Her father’s mill
Her father, G. Varadaraj, was an industrialist, educationist and politician. He was managing trustee of the PSG institutions from 1978, and a member of the Rajya Sabha for six years from 1983. In the mid-1980s he promoted Rajshree Sugars & Chemicals, with a sugar factory near Andipatti in what is now Theni district, a drought-prone, backward area where the mill brought jobs. The company was incorporated in December 1985.
Rajshree joined the company in March 1989, according to its 2010–11 annual report.
Then, on 23 October 1990, her father died, according to the commemorative stamp India Post issued in his honour in 2006. Business Standard’s 2005 profile describes how it happened: on a trip to Amsterdam, he choked on a piece of food at dinner and went into a coma for 12 days. (That article dates the event to 1995, but the stamp, the company’s records and later reporting all point to 1990.) A few months later, her mother lost her memory.
Two years of cash losses
Rajshree took over as managing director in 1990. Business Today has described her as the first woman managing director of a sugar mill in India.
The early years were hard. Cane was scarce, and so was cash. “For two years we went through a cash loss,” she told Business Standard. “There was no money.” She travelled back and forth between Andipatti and Coimbatore, and was expecting her second child, a son, at the time.
Large sugar companies in the state, including EID Parry and Sakthi, urged her to sell. When she refused, Business Standard reported, they approached her in-laws instead. She still did not sell.
Her first major decision was to take the company public, which some people called arrogant. Her answer, as she told Business Standard: “This was public money I was dealing with.”
She also went back to learning. She attended Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management Programme between 1994 and 1996, and later a programme at INSEAD. In 1996, the World Economic Forum named her a Global Leader for Tomorrow.
Sugar, alcohol and power from one cane
A sugar mill produces two large by-products: molasses, which can be distilled into alcohol, and bagasse, the fibre left after crushing, which can be burned to make electricity. Under Rajshree, the company built a business on both.
In 1995–96, it installed a 12 MW cogeneration system to make power from bagasse. A distillery at the Theni unit turned molasses into alcohol, and in July 2003 the company began producing anhydrous ethanol, the kind blended into petrol. According to company filings, Rajshree became the first ISO 9001:2000 certified integrated sugar complex in India, producing sugar, alcohol, power, organic manure and bio-products.
It also grew by acquisition. In 2001–02, it bought South India Sugars in Villupuram district, which became its Mundiampakkam unit, where a 22 MW bagasse-based power plant was commissioned in 2005. In 2006, it acquired Trident Sugars, a sugar factory in Zaheerabad, then in Andhra Pradesh. A third Tamil Nadu unit followed at Semmedu near Gingee, with an 80 KL-per-day distillery commissioned in April 2012.
Business Standard put the group’s size at about ₹350 crore in 2005. By 2012, Outlook Business was describing it as an ₹831-crore company.
A voice for the industry
Rajshree served as president of the South Indian Sugar Mills Association from 1995 to 1997, and again from 2007 to 2009. In 2004, she became the first woman president of the Indian Sugar Mills Association. Around that time, Business Standard reported, she was lobbying for ethanol to be recognised as an automotive fuel, an idea that has since become national policy.
She was also active in the Confederation of Indian Industry, chairing its national committee on textiles from 1996 to 1999 and its Southern Region in 2015–16. She received an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2000.
The sugar business remained cyclical. Business Today reported in 2017 that the company had come through three successive years of losses before posting a profit of ₹29.94 crore in 2016–17, and that it had expanded into food, energy and agri-business.
Design, art and Ayurveda
The girl who wanted to study architecture never left that interest behind. In 2012, she founded the India Design Forum. Its first edition that March ran for 10 days, with two days of talks by about 50 design experts. “Design is not just about fashion or luxury,” she told Outlook Business that year. Her daughter Aishwarya, a trained graphic designer, co-founded the forum with her, as well as the Coimbatore College of Contemporary Arts. She has also promoted contemporary art in Coimbatore through the Contemplate gallery.
Ayurveda was the other thread. Sundays in her childhood home were for oil massages and herbal baths, according to The Global Indian. In 2002, she co-founded the Ayurvedic beauty brand Kama Ayurveda with Vivek Sahni. She stepped away in 2022, after the Spanish beauty group Puig took a majority stake. “Kama will always have a soft spot in my heart,” she told YourStory. In 2024, she launched a new brand, Qi Ayurveda.
In 2013, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri for trade and industry. She has said it “felt like an honour shared with thousands” who had supported her over the years.
Where things stand
Rajshree is now the non-executive Chairperson of Rajshree Sugars & Chemicals, a role she has held since at least 2019, with day-to-day operations led by wholetime director R. Varadarajan, who has been with the company since its start. For the year ended 31 March 2026, the company reported revenue from operations of ₹544.7 crore and a small net profit of ₹1.1 crore. Its distillery and power businesses brought in about ₹128 crore and ₹77 crore respectively, before inter-segment adjustments.
In 2005, Business Standard noted that her family had been involved in motor racing since 1952, and that she had herself raced at Sholavaram. She has dived in the Maldives for more than two decades. “When I am 90 feet under the water, I am most intimately connected with the universe,” she told Outlook Business in 2012.
She came into the sugar business through loss, and at a time when its owners were expected to be men. More than three decades later, she is still chairing the company her father started.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: Business Standard (December 2005); Outlook Business (July 2012); Business Today (September 2017); The Global Indian (September 2026); YourStory (2024); India Post commemorative stamp, G. Varadaraj (November 2006); Rajshree Sugars & Chemicals annual report 2010–11 and BSE/NSE filings (November 2019, August 2023, May 2026); IIFL company profile; World Economic Forum profile; Cosmetics Design Asia (September 2022).
