In 1974, Sudha Murty, having recently completed her engineering degree, saw a job advertisement from a leading Indian automobile company that explicitly stated 'Lady candidates need not apply.' Rather than accepting the exclusion, she wrote directly to the company's chairman objecting to the policy, and was subsequently called in for an interview and hired — becoming the first woman engineer at that company.
She went on to work in the technology sector and later co-founded Infosys alongside her husband, N.R. Narayana Murthy, reportedly lending a portion of her own savings to help fund the company's early operations, a detail she has spoken about publicly as an example of quietly practical support rather than a headline-making contribution.
As Infosys grew into one of India's largest technology companies, Murty largely stepped back from the corporate spotlight and focused instead on the Infosys Foundation, directing its philanthropic work toward building libraries, schools, and healthcare access in rural and underserved parts of India, often personally visiting remote project sites rather than managing entirely from a distance.
She also became a widely read author, writing simply structured stories and memoirs in both English and Kannada aimed at making literature accessible to readers who might not otherwise engage with formal literary fiction, continuing a pattern throughout her career of building direct access to things — jobs, books, education — rather than waiting for institutions to offer them.