If India wants to genuinely be China plus one, it has to demonstrate end-to-end cost advantage: Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi

YOU ARE among the very few women in the manufacturing sector, which brings down overall representation to very low single digits. Could you walk us through how your journey began?

I was born in Gujarat. My dad worked for Indian Oil Corp., which involved moving around and building oil refineries. I spent my early years in Bihar and in Assam, and then, like most Tamilians, we ended up in Chennai after my dad passed away. I did my 10th, 11th, and 12th in Chennai, and then came the crucial choices. In my family, no one followed the engineer-or-doctor narrative. My sisters were into anthropology and political science. I finally decided somebody needed a real job to pay the bills, so I went to... Pilani and did mechanical engineering, for no reason other than I thought it would be hands-on and fun. There was no internet in those days to think through these options carefully.