India Inc.’s DEI push: Amid Trump’s DEI rollback in the U.S., corporates in India commit to stay true to the diversity and inclusion agenda

Over the last three months, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) specialists across corporate India have found themselves confronting a low-level obstacle course. Subjects from global technology companies have ghosted or regretfully withdrawn participation in ongoing research studies. DEI teams, particularly in companies headquartered in the U.S., have suddenly begun to describe themselves as working on culture, or accessibility. Journalists are asking: “Is meritocracy back?”

The shift comes in the wake of several large American companies, including Walmart, Meta, Amazon, Ford, Boeing and others, publicly scaling back their DEI programmes, following newly-elected U.S. president Donald Trump’s Executive Order in January to put a stop to all “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” and “public waste” in the name of DEI efforts. U.S. government departments have ordered probes into organisations, including hospitals, universities, federal contractors, and media companies, that practice DEI. Experts fear that legal rulings, such as the June 2024 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court that ended race-conscious affirmative action in higher education, will jeopardise efforts meant to address social bias in the workplace.

But DEI in India, even in multinational corporations, and despite its own set of challenges, is poised to grow. In many major firms, efforts to advance inclusion for historically excluded groups — specifically women, LGBTQIA+ people, and persons with disabilities — goes back years, and in some cases, decades. This has made it complicated to roll back or shut down ongoing efforts related to the Indian context.

The study included 251 organisations across India.

In addition, while these global firms are seen as beacons of DEI movements, some of India’s biggest corporations have taken up the cause. Over the last five years, some have set entirely new aspirational benchmarks, creating what HR experts call “islands of diversity” — in 2022, Hindustan Unilever inaugurated the first gender-balanced manufacturing unit in Sumerpur, Uttar Pradesh; and at Tata Steel, last year, the company announced it was recruiting and formally training transgender workers for frontline roles in mining and other heavy industry functions typically dominated by cisgender men.

Caste or religion may not fall under the purview of any formal DEI programme in the Indian private sector. But they do form the partial basis for what is almost certainly the largest bias-correcting effort in Indian workplaces in public sector jobs

Recruiters say that Indian businesses are in such critical need of talent that they must necessarily act to expand their talent pools — something borne out by an uncoordinated but widespread focus on DEI even among smaller businesses. The Indian context outside the technology and finance sectors demands investment in inclusive recruiting. “We’re still at the stage where we’re building women’s toilets in factories that never had them,” a business leader says. “That’s what DEI is in India. You can’t roll back from that.”

Take construction and real estate, a high-growth sector with almost no women on the leadership track. “We have 37% representation of women, but most of our hiring is at early-career levels,” my colleague Megha Goel, Chief People Officer at Godrej Properties, says. “Look at the pipeline in operations roles for the industry. In college, girls aren’t motivated to pick specialisations like civil engineering. When they do, they don’t stick it out in line roles because most seniors tell young women, ‘Why don’t you get into billing or procurement?’. So tomorrow, if you’re looking for a woman COO, the market isn’t there.” In a sector like this, companies committing to DEI must essentially commit to longitudinal work, beginning with entry-level pipelines and going on to work culture itself.

Not a passing trend

Over dozens of conversations with DEI experts in the months since the rollbacks began in the U.S., I assumed I was hearing widespread enthusiasm for DEI because of confirmation bias, since I work for the Godrej DEI Lab, which works to advance inclusion within the Godrej Industries Group as well as across corporate India. I reached out to seven multinational corporations whose ongoing DEI efforts I’m aware of, to ask how they were responding to the changing environment. Six of these, headquartered in the United States, did not respond.

It was a different story with other global firms. “For us, DEI is not a passing trend — it’s fundamental to who we are,” says Taruna Suhasini Lohmror, Country Centres of Expertise manager at IKEA India. IKEA is publicly committed to achieving gender parity in representation and pay worldwide. “We see challenges as opportunities to reinforce our values and strengthen our efforts,” adds Lohmror.

Taruna Suhasini Lohmror, Country Centres of Expertise manager at IKEA India

One HR leader at an Indian affiliate of a French company says that her own company continues to track its representation and has an annual calendar for its inclusion work, which includes ‘breaking the bias’ programming and efforts to create generational diversity in its workforce in addition to its women, queer and disabled cohorts. “We are not shying away from talking about inclusion in all its forms,” she says. “It is integral to our customers and employees.”

Time for a new model?

But even where teams may be going quiet, or finding funding challenging in the short term, there’s no going back, says Bhawana Mishra, founder and managing director, BasilTree Consulting. Over 250 companies participated in BasilTree’s ‘DEI In India Inc: 2025’ report, a complex and clear perspective on the maturity of DEI efforts in corporate India that shows, perhaps for the first time, how inclusion efforts across Indian industry aren’t purely correlated to sectors, but also to the maturity that comes with age, and size. “Companies that are over 20 years old and employ more than 1,000 people are leading the charge,” she explains. In smaller organisations, DEI is a more sporadic effort, even if there’s enthusiasm for it. “The attitude, predominantly, is that HR gets it, but that the business case hasn’t been established yet.”

“DEI impact studies are still not a way of life in corporate India. Only 14% of companies assess business impact, the others remain at the level of assessing employee experience. As a result, while India Inc is firmly committed to the DEI agenda, on paper and in practice, they’re not always able to make the transition from ‘feel-good-thing’ to ‘right-thing’. That is the need of the hour.”Bhawana MishraFounder and managing director, BasilTree Consulting

Tech and multinational firms were more reluctant to participate in the BasilTree study, and Mishra found there was “uncertainty, rather than fear”, over the future of inclusion efforts in many international companies. The consultancy Ungender, which helps companies maintain compliance with workplace anti-discrimination laws and build inclusive culture, says that over 60% of the organisations they support have continued or expanded their inclusion efforts — but over half are consciously renaming or repositioning their work.

“Indian companies — particularly with global stakeholders — are becoming more thoughtful in how they present and implement their DEI efforts,” says Pallavi Pareek, CEO and founder of Ungender. In the short term, this may mean crucial setbacks to making representation data public, or limited media outreach around engagements during Pride Month, or Women’s Day. But there’s no evidence yet that it will halt efforts at hiring or retention, and all the recruiters I spoke to found it unlikely to slow down. Like Mishra, Pareek recalls one of her global tech clients saying: “We’ll be doing the work, just not calling it DEI any more.”

Pallavi Pareek, CEO and founder of Ungender

Structural bias continues

Perhaps the most tangible impact of going quiet will be on queer communities. While governments and courts have spoken out in favour of social inclusion for trans people, the case for LGBTQIA+ inclusion is less well-understood than DEI favouring women. Queer people have been caught in the crossfire from the U.S.-led discourse since well before Trump came to power, notably when Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal publicly attacked the growing use of non-traditional pronouns among transgender people last year.

But even in sectors most open to the brash machismo that now characterises Silicon Valley conversations, I found no nostalgia for conservative ideas of merit, or old-school office hierarchy. “It [the anti-DEI stance] isn’t filtering down,” says Bengaluru-based Nandini Vishwanath of Antler, a venture capital firm. “Even those who’re posting about the backlash on Twitter” — now X — “simply aren’t thinking about it in a workplace context.”

“Our culture doesn’t allow our founders to fail, and the ones who consider these things [policies such as family leave or accessible infrastructure that make workplaces more equitable] important are called ‘soft’ founders.”Nandini VishwanathVenture Capitalist, Antler

Venture-backed tech has its own problems. Small, high-earning teams with highly educated leaders may be less inclined to overt intolerance. But their size and capital constraints come into conflict with cultivating inclusivity. Structural bias is rampant: there are few women founders and leaders, and policies that make workplaces more equitable — such as family leave or accessible infrastructure — fall far behind in priority. “Our culture doesn’t allow founders to fail, and the ones who consider these things important are called ‘soft’ founders,” adds Vishwanath.

This is a variation of the problem of ‘greedy jobs’, the Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin’s formulation of demanding and financially rewarding roles, typically structured in favour of privileged men. In sectors like private equity, where there are no more than 50 new jobs in India every year, advocates for gender diversity have to begin with encouraging the industry simply to reconsider their idea of what constitutes a good workplace — in other words, not one that’s necessarily full of other men who went to the same college as you. It’s psychologically easier to accept that factories should have clean toilets for women on-site: the “Indian” stage of DEI.

Supportive Indian government

Every expert I spoke to emphasised that DEI in India is growing because the situation here is different from the U.S. I find this fundamentally true in the sense that Indian governments at the centre and in states are broadly in favour of expanding opportunities for women and people with disabilities, and there is some support for trans people, if not widely for the LGBTQIA+ community.

From announcing provisions for working women’s housing in the national budget, to the Tamil Nadu government’s public encouragement for companies hiring transgender people, the private sector can see itself in varying levels of partnership with the government in this agenda. (My boss Parmesh Shahani, head of Godrej DEI Lab and author of the 2020 book, Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion in the Indian Workplace, often meets with gruff old-school corporate honchos who ask him for recruitment advice: ‘We also want to hire some LGBTQs,’ I overheard a cement industry leader say to him last year.)

Parmesh Shahani, head of Godrej DEI Lab and author of the 2020 book, ‘Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion in the Indian Workplace’.

Most importantly, the backing from public institutions is a reminder that in India, any imagined contest between inclusion and meritocracy is pernicious, and overlooks our social and historical context. Indian governments have arguably led the way for DEI in a historically crucial way. Caste or religion, which constitutes major faultlines in Indian politics and society, do not fall under the purview of any formal DEI programme I know of in the Indian private sector. But they do form the partial basis for what is almost certainly the largest bias-correcting effort ever conducted in Indian workplaces, in the form of reservations for people from SC/ST communities in public sector jobs.

The legal protections for these reservations, and their basis in the values of the Constitution of India, are also fundamental to how some of the oldest and most successful corporations in the country, including the Tata Group, the Aditya Birla Group, and the Mahindra Group, publicly talk about their responsibility to their organisations and Indian society at large.

“We’ve learnt a lot from businesses in the U.S. that stepped up over the last decade to commit to racial justice, queer empowerment, and gender equity,” says Shahani. “But our ideas are rooted in our concepts of social justice, our legal environment, and our values. I think we should, in all humility, return to the idea that India can light the path for inclusion for others, and work towards it.”

The writer is head of research and media, Godrej DEI Lab.