Anita M. N.

Anita has spent nearly thirty years in machine tools and precision engineering. She is Managing Partner of Chamundi Machine Tool Accessories, the firm her father M. G. Nanjundappa founded in 1983, and which she joined in 1996 after a diploma in Machine Tool Technology from Sri Jayachamarajendra Polytechnic.

Her work is Special Purpose Machines — machines built for one job that no catalogue machine does — and she has run that from both ends: sitting with a customer to work out what they actually need, then concept, design, manufacture, assembly, testing and dispatch.

Her father died in 2011 and she took over the business on her own. In the fifteen years since she has handled the finance, the production, the workshop, the project execution, the customers and the business development. That is what running a small manufacturer looks like, and it is why she can talk about the technical and the commercial side of one with equal authority.

Chamundi has worked with HMT, BEML and HAL, and holds long-standing relationships with WIDIA and Hindustan Motors. She is now looking at aerospace, advanced manufacturing and material-handling work, and at building a younger technical team to take it there.

She is direct about what she wants students to hear: that someone leading a manufacturing business has to understand the shop floor, the customer, the people and the process — not just the business. And to women in particular, that what usually stands in the way is being willing to take responsibility and step into unfamiliar territory, rather than anything technical.