Chitra Ramkrishna, who helped build NSE and now runs it

Mumbai: It’s rare that a woman runs a stock exchange—there are just three in the world. Even rarer to find one who was chosen 23 years ago for the crack team that created it and then climbed the ranks to become its chief executive officer in traditionally patriarchal India.

Chitra Ramkrishna, 52 and head of the National Stock Exchange of India Ltd (NSE), wants to retain the startup culture of her early days that helped grow the NSE into the world’s third-largest bourse by number of trades and the leader in India with an 82% market share that dwarfs the 140-year-old BSE Ltd. When NSE needs something new, it creates a team: Currency trading, bond futures and exchange-traded funds are the fruits so far. Another team is now working on bond innovations to go beyond the current 10-year product.

“There is a huge level of energy and can-do attitude that is in a startup culture which we shouldn’t lose,” Ramkrishna said in an interview last month at the NSE’s squat, glass- fronted headquarters in Mumbai. “For the rest, there is huge focus on processes and discipline that we have to bank upon. We try to get the best of both the worlds.”

Ramkrishna, an upper-caste Brahmin who calls Mahatma Gandhi her role model, wants to make stock markets accessible to India’s middle classes using the exchange-traded baskets of securities known as ETFs.

“I’m sure even he would have bought my ETFs!” she said.

National Stock Exchange of India Ltd (NSE)