Steel, Grit & a Mind of Her Own: The Making of Sminu Jindal

The grab bar came off with a light touch.

Sminu Jindal recalls it among the failures she has encountered in supposedly accessible accommodation. Toilet seats have broken beneath her more than once. Before she books a hotel she asks for a video of the accessible room. Getting one is often a negotiation.

Then she arrives. Her helper cleans the glasses, the countertop, the basin, the toilet. Sometimes the accessible room sits next to reception, where the noise makes sleep difficult before an early meeting. Staff may want to help. Knowing how is a different matter.

“A lovely receptionist is pure chance,” she reckons.

She would like less of her independence to rest on chance.

As managing director of Jindal SAW, she helps lead a company manufacturing pipes that move water, oil and gas across continents. Through Svayam, the accessibility organisation she founded in 2000, she confronts the quieter barriers that stop people moving through their own cities. A hotel bathroom reduces that second battle to its most intimate scale: a fitting designed to support her cannot be trusted to stay attached to the wall.

“We pay the same, in fact more, because every adjustment costs money,” she underlines.

The irritation is precise. She can name exactly what is missing—an accessible vehicle, trained staff, a usable room, equipment that does not fail under ordinary use. She wonders why five-star hotels cannot keep a single larger van with a ramp. It could carry other guests’ luggage too.

“Nobody has joined up the thinking to make travel comfortable for people with reduced mobility,” she asserts.

In a candid interview with OPEN Digital, Jindal talks about the privilege that helped her, the decisions she got wrong and the patience she is still trying to learn. She has spent decades asking people to reconsider what they think she can do.

SWASTIK FOILS: EARNING AUTHORITY ON THE FACTORY FLOOR

In 1994, the year she finished college, her father handed her a test.

Swastik Foils, a loss-making unit making thin stainless-steel coils, needed someone to take responsibility. Jindal had already spent time learning how the departments worked. Now she would have to hold them together and make the numbers move.

“It was my ticket either to stay in business or to go out,” she recalls.

Then eleven department heads walked out.

That is how she remembers the beginning: a young woman fresh from college, using a wheelchair, facing men who would not accept her authority. The opportunity her father had given her suddenly included a vacuum where the management team should have been.

He asked what she planned to do.

“I don’t know, I’ll see what I can do,” she remembers telling him.

“What do you mean you don’t know? Give it your best shot,” her father replied, she recalls.

She had been given the role. She did not yet have the answer.

The Jindal name opened doors.

“The name got me in,” she acknowledges.

It allowed her father to place her in leadership. It gave her the chance to try. She calls it an entry card, while acknowledging that even this formidable introduction could not stop a revolt.

She studied engineering books so she could speak to supervisors in their language. At the same time she was completing her MBA. At Swastik she concentrated on the product and invested in machinery. Better quality led, in her account, to better sales and profitability.

“Honestly, nothing was fundamentally wrong. The unit simply hadn’t had enough concentration on it,” she says.

Some assumptions were brutally literal. How could a woman who could not climb into a pit and get her hands dirty claim to understand a machine?

“But that isn’t the only way to run a machine,” she points out.

There was sympathy too, and that created its own problem.

“If you lead a team, you want them to look up to you for strength, not sympathy,” she says.

SMINU JINDAL’S EARLY BUSINESS LESSONS

Years later, she recalls facing resistance at a plant in Texas, where she had gone after her marriage to help turn around another unit. She says she received threats telling her to go back where she came from.

One day, she recalls, she noticed a welder using too much oxygen. She raised it with the supervisor.

He went to check.

The welder admitted the fault.

“You were right,” the supervisor told her, she recalls.

Her eye for the machinery had served her well. Reading the market could prove more difficult.

At Swastik she had an idea for bicycle rims—replace mild steel with extra-thin stainless steel. Strength, lower weight, better appearance. She believed buyers would see the value.

“What I learned the hard way was that consumers prioritize overall cost just as much as quality,” she says.

The extra manufacturing cost complicated the proposition. What looked like an improvement to her did not necessarily offer customers enough value at the resulting price.

The lesson stayed with her: the cost had to make sense to the customer. A better material could not settle that question on its own.

LEADING JINDAL SAW: GROWTH, TRUST AND TEAMWORK

Jindal SAW today operates at a scale that can make those early lessons feel distant. Consolidated revenue from operations stood at about ₹17,895 crore in FY26. The portfolio includes multiple categories of pipes and tubes as well as pellets, serving infrastructure and industrial customers.

Scale brings new tests. Revenue and profit declined from the previous year. The company continues to pursue manufacturing expansion in the Middle East.

Jindal says the capital remains committed even when circumstances are difficult. Progress may be slower than she would prefer.

“Some may say it’s an unsteady investment, and we are going slow, but we will never cancel it,” she says.

Asked to name the contribution that followed her elevation to managing director, she refuses a neat personal milestone.

“Organisations change collectively,” she says.

She talks about diversification, the revival of the seamless business, the addition of ductile-iron pipes. The way she describes management now places heavy emphasis on giving capable people room to work.

“They’re all adults,” she says of her colleagues.

Agreement on what needs doing comes through discussion. After that she wants employees to feel trusted. She tries to offer the room, time and patience she would want for herself.

Giving people time has required her to rethink her own expectations.

Early in her career she was absorbed by project-planning techniques such as PERT and CPM. She assumed that adding more people would simply accelerate the work.

Experience rewrote the equation.

“Everybody has their own space to move and their own contribution to make, at their own pace,” she says.

DISABILITY, FAMILY SUPPORT AND THE JINDAL PRIVILEGE

Jindal was eleven when a spinal cord injury after a car accident changed her mobility. Her family could respond with resources most people will never have.

Asked how much wealth and family support helped, she answers with a single word.

“Immensely,” she says.

They made adaptations. They tracked medical developments. That support made education, travel and work more manageable.

She understands the weight of that advantage. Someone with equal talent might struggle simply to board a flight, reach a classroom or leave home independently.

“Many talented people could achieve a lot for their country, families and themselves if they had accessible ways to do things,” she says.

She wants people to have the dignity of “moving with grace”: to participate without every journey becoming a project for somebody else to organise. Through Svayam she has worked on accessibility in public spaces, travel and daily life. Her focus includes older people, pregnant women, parents with small children, and anyone whose mobility is temporarily reduced.

The hotel room, in that sense, is a preview of a problem most of us will eventually face.

“And remember, we will all grow old and have reduced mobility at some point,” she points out.

WHY SMINU JINDAL FOUNDED SVAYAM

When Svayam began, Jindal believed information and opportunity could help people enter working life. She recalls putting out a job portal and, despite the effort, receiving only one application.

That single response sent her further back along the chain.

How does someone qualify for a job if they cannot reach school? How do they learn a trade if the training centre is inaccessible? How do they report for work if the journey from home is impossible?

The vacancy sat at the end of a sequence of opportunities many people had never been able to reach.

“Accessibility had to be created in their surroundings so they could travel from home to the place of their choice,” she explains.

Svayam’s work expanded into access audits, advice on buildings, training and advocacy. Jindal describes teams returning after alterations to check whether the work has been done properly. She wants the organisations they advise to keep the knowledge themselves.

Beyond institutional buildings she talks about accessible toilets in rural homes and the quiet consequences of depending on others for something so basic.

She recalls meeting people whose exclusion from earning had diminished their standing within their own families. In some households, she says, they were scarcely consulted even about what they wanted to eat.

DISABILITY INCLUSION AT JINDAL SAW

The accessibility argument circles back to her own company.

Asked how successful Jindal SAW has been at employing people with disabilities, she does not reach for a polished claim.

“I’ll tackle it straight away: we haven’t had much success with this,” she acknowledges.

She recalls two colleagues with hearing and speech disabilities who worked with her for about eighteen years. One, a lathe operator, remains among her best workers, she says.

Her explanation for the wider difficulty returns to skills. Education, training and transport must allow people to acquire the capabilities jobs require. Without that foundation an employment promise remains mostly theory.

The answer leaves a challenge for her business as much as for the institutions she wants to change: how to help more people gain those skills and enter meaningful work.

She is equally open about needing other people’s knowledge. Asked whether the long pressure to prove herself has made it hard to seek help, she rejects the premise.

“When you have people around you who know a lot more than you, it’s only prudent to ask them for help,” she says.

SMINU JINDAL ON AMBITION, PATIENCE AND SELF-JUDGEMENT

Away from work Jindal describes herself as “a true dreamer”. She paints, sings, listens to music, reads fiction. Her curiosity has even taken her into crystal therapy.

The recurring shortage is time.

She describes her impatience in almost physical terms.

“I’m always running on a horse, always flying faster than what possibly even I can pursue at that time, and just want everything today,” she says.

Asked what she would tell the young woman who first entered the factory, she addresses every version of herself—younger, older, older still.

Learn patience.

She knows how much energy she once spent worrying about the future, planning every step, trying to arrive sooner. Looking back she sees time that might have been spent enjoying where she already was.

That recognition sits beside her continuing impatience with barriers that have lasted decades. She is learning to allow people their own pace while still asking institutions to move faster. Both demands require her to work with others. Neither is fully under her control.

When asked how her progress should be judged five years from now, she begins with a request.

“I would like for people to judge me with a little bit of kindness,” she says.

Then the measures: value created in her companies, how comfortable people feel working with her, their happiness, how Svayam develops and what it contributes to individual lives.

She wants the world to become more accessible so people can live the lives they choose. As for her own performance, she already has a demanding assessor.

“You just be kind in judging because I think I’m extremely harsh in judging my own self,” she says.

Her advice to herself has settled into two words: patience and kindness.

There is still the hotel room to book. Still the video to request. Still the question of whether the fittings will hold.

She would like those questions settled already.