Rekha Menon

Founder

Rekha Menon is the founder of Pratham Books [1], an Indian non-profit working on education and arts & culture from Bengaluru.

Rekha Mehrotra Menon is an Indian business executive who was chairperson and senior managing director of Accenture in India from 2004 to 2023, and the first woman to chair Nasscom, the industry body for India's technology sector. Her official corporate biographies describe her as a co-founder of Pratham Books, the non-profit children's publisher founded in Mumbai in 2004 with the aim of putting a book in every child's hand.

She now serves as an independent director on corporate boards, including Biocon, and has chaired the G20 EMPOWER working group on corporate women's empowerment.

Education

Menon holds an MBA from XLRI Xavier School of Management.

Career

Menon spent her executive career at Accenture, latterly as chairperson and senior managing director of the firm's India business between 2004 and 2023. She was the first woman to serve as chair of Nasscom. She has held directorships at Invest India and Legrand, and is an independent director of Biocon.

Alongside her corporate work she has been associated with non-profit organisations in children's education, notably Pratham Books, a publisher of low-cost children's books in Indian languages that grew out of the Pratham education movement, and the Akshara Foundation in Bengaluru.

Recognition

Menon has appeared on Fortune India's list of the Most Powerful Women in Business in India and in Business Today's Most Powerful Women Hall of Fame.[2][3][4]

Pratham Books

Pratham Books is a not-for-profit children's publisher, set up in 2004, that creates affordable storybooks in Indian languages. Its open-licence digital platform StoryWeaver hosts 34,000+ books in 296 languages, and the organisation reports 7,000 books published and 40,000 libraries reached.

Pratham Books reports the following, on its own site: