Lila Poonawalla  Lila Firoz Poonawalla (born 16 September 1944) is an Indian industrialist, philanthropist, humanitarian and the founder of "Lila Poonawalla Foundation", a non governmental organization promoting professional education among aspiring girls in India by providing scholarships and guidance. She is the second Indian woman to secure a professional degree in Mechanical Engineering and is a former chairperson of Alfa Laval India and TetraPak India. She was awarded the fourth highest civilian award of Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1989 and the Order of the Polar Star by Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, in 2003. Lila Poonawalla, née Lila Thadani, was born on 16 September 1944 in Hyderabad in the Sindh region in British India as one of the five children in a Sindhi family. She lost her father when she was three years old and, during the partition of India, her family moved to India as refugees to settle in Pune. She did her early education in Pune after which she graduated in mechanical engineering with first class from the Government College of Engineering under the University of Pune in 1967. She started her career as an apprentice at Ruston and Hornsby where she met with her future husband, Firoz Poonawalla, who was from a Dawoodi Bohra family and was working in the same company. As the company rules prohibited the members of the same family working together, she moved, as a trainee engineer, to the Indian division Alfa Laval, the Swedish multinational, where she worked in various positions to rise to hold the office of the chairperson in a span of two decades, thus becoming one of the first woman CEOs in India. During her career, she pursued management studies at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Harvard University and Stanford University. Under her management, Alfa Laval India operations grew from 500 million to 2.5 billion and eventually she took over the TetraPak operations in India as its Chief Executive Office, serving the companies till her retirement in 2001. Poonawalla couple have no children and live in Pune where Firoz Poonawalla has based his floriculture export business. Poonawalla's contributions are reported behind the establishment of a Pune-Swedish chapter at the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (MACCIA) which came into being in 2001. After her retirement from Alfa Laval, she opened a consultancy firm under the name, "Lila Consulting Services Company", and acts as an advisor to several companies; Schlumberger, USA and Arco Safety Equipment, UK featuring among her clients.