HP India's Ipsita Dasgupta on being a woman corporate leader, and more

Dasgupta tells Shivani Shinde why she believes there should be a PC in every child's hand, and why India is tougher on women than the US

It’s one of those drenched Mumbai monsoon days that can turn even the most carefully planned diaries to mush. Our lunch at Vetro, the Italian restaurant at The Oberoi, Nariman Point, Mumbai, has already been rained off once. Today, the skies are still heavy, but Ipsita Dasgupta arrives early, claiming a corner table before I manage to navigate the traffic.

 

Her résumé reads like a roll call of global tech royalty — Amazon, Apple, IBM, Cisco, GE — and now the top job at HP India. What’s striking is the absence of battle scars so many women in corporate India recount. Dasgupta isn’t claiming the playing field is even. “India is tougher on women than the US, or even China, where the factories are full of women,” she concedes, but she wears her success without complaint.

 

“I grew up in the US and a handful of other countries, but my roots have always been in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Both my parents are from there,” she says. “Every summer and winter, we’d come back when the whole family — brothers and sisters scattered across the world — would meet.” Though raised abroad, she never felt disconnected from India. “Ours was a quintessentially Bengali household, deeply engaged with politics, culture, and everything happening back home. Yet, when I finally moved to India as an adult, I realised how little I knew about living here without the cushion of extended family.”

 

We order vegetarian food. Dasgupta chooses Insalata di Barbabietola Arrostita —a beetroot salad with coconut yogurt, rhubarb and glazed figs. I go for Risotto alle Melanzane.

 

Dasgupta, 48, first moved to India in 2008, when her husband took up a role with Goldman Sachs and she was with IBM. Stints with GE in China and later Apple in Cupertino followed, but except for about four years abroad, she has been in India ever since. “I had my kids in 2014 after moving back from China,” she says. “Although I’m very Indian at heart, they are truly Indian. They know every single story and correct me all the time. Plus, they never stop teasing me aboutmy accent.” 

 

Like many women, her career has rested on the quiet scaffolding of family support. During her time at Apple, it was her mother’s presence in India — she had moved from Singapore — that made the constant shuttling between Cupertino and Mumbai possible. “I must have taken about 20 flights a year,” Dasgupta estimates. It was only manageable because someone at home could hold the centre while she moved. 

Our food arrives. My aubergine risotto with goat cheese fondue and smoked cherry tomato is creamy and comforting.

 

Dasgupta’s career path, she says, has been guided less by designations than by people who nudged her toward new challenges. “I spent eight years at IBM, then about a year-and-a-half at Cisco, five years at GE, moved to Star, then Apple, and now HP,” she recounts. “If you ask me what my DNA is, it’s deep tech and manufacturing.” 

Each career shift, she says, was sparked by people. “John Flannery, who was the MD of GE India, spent a year urging me to join; by the time I’d met so many people at GE, I’d fallen in love with the company,” she laughs. It was the same with Star: Uday Shankar and she spent nearly a year in conversation before she made the move. “What has always interested me is working at the intersection of technology and transformation, building something new with the people I trust.” 

I ask about her move from business-to-business (B2B) firms like GE and Cisco to consumer-facing companies such as Apple and HP. “For me, it was about understanding that segment,” she says simply. “I want to be the person who understands this better than anyone else.” 

Perhaps this openness is what draws people to her. “I suspect those who approached me were the most evolved — they wanted diversity of thought and experience. A lot of companies talk about diversity in terms of identity, but very

few have the courage to embrace diversity of thinking.” 

Her time at HP — a little over two years — has only deepened that conviction. She has spent it building a leadership team that, she believes, delivers precisely because each member brings something different to the table. “Coming out of Covid — and even now — I can’t think of anything more valuable than diversity of thought,” she says. “It’s what really stands out.”

 

When the call from HP came, it wasn’t just the scale of the role that drew her in but the authenticity of the people behind it. “Everyone at HP, including Enrique Lores, the CEO, and Dave McQuarrie, the chief commercial officer, was just fantastic,” she says. What sealed it, though, was the challenge. “The first thing they said was: ‘HP India is a multi-billion-dollar business that wants to triple its size. It’s already among the 10 largest MNCs in the country.’ How do you not sign up for that?” 

When I ask if the biggest challenge is India’s low personal computer (PC) penetration — still below 20 per cent, it had lifted briefly during Covid but has been stagnant since — Dasgupta reframes the question. “Is it something that needs to happen? I fundamentally believe it does.” 

Her conviction stems from a simple observation. “If you walk into a room with three kids — one on a phone, one on a tablet, and one on a PC — which one do you think is learning?” she asks. “Most people say the one on the PC. Phones and tablets are consumption devices; PCs are for creation and productivity.” 

In the US, she says, there are seven screens per household and every child has a PC. “In India, there are four screens — all phones. We watch as much entertainment as Americans, but spend barely five per cent of that time being productive.” The implications, she says, are enormous. “If India has to generate 200 million jobs, close the skills gap, and become the workforce of an aging world, this is not a problem we can ignore.” 

What has that meant for HP? “Instead of asking how do I sell a PC, I asked why should a household want one? 

The use cases are education and income generation.”HP’s strategy now revolves around those two anchors. In stores, her team retrains promoters to begin with questions like, “What do you need it for?; “What does your seven-year-old do?”, rather than quoting specs. “If a parent mentions a learning disability, we have content and solutions ready. The conversation changes; the PC becomes a means, not a machine.”

 

HP’s other focus, says Dasgupta, is working with state governments — not to sell hardware, but to build digital livelihoods. “We’re running proof-of-concept projects around skilling and income generation rather than simple hardware sales,” she explains. “We’re testing what software works, what households need, and building those models together.” 

At the retail end, HP is experimenting, too. A partnership with Croma in Mumbai’s Juhu has birthed AI Gurukul, where customers who buy HP laptops can access weekend tutoring sessions from teachers often booked months in advance. “It’s become incredibly popular,” Dasgupta says, “especially among students learning Excel or PowerPoint, and yoga instructors who want to teach virtually or promote themselves on YouTube. That’s what we mean by creating use cases: Making the PC integral to how India learns, works and earns.”

 

Does the rise of AI risk widening India’s digital divide? Dasgupta doesn’t hesitate. “The first area where we’ll see more issues isn’t between individuals; it’s between big and small companies. Large enterprises can afford to experiment with AI, hire lawyers and accountants to validate what AI produces. MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises), simply can’t.” 

To bridge that gap, HP partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to establish a Centre for AI aimed at bringing smaller businesses into the fold. “We targeted 10,000 MSMEs across India and have already trained over 7,000 employees in 15 cities,” she says. “We run six-to-eight-hour workshops that teach simple, practical hacks — whether you’re in marketing, finance or operations — to make AI usable.” The response, she adds, has been so strong that “even large companies have started sending their CMOs (chief marketing officers) and finance teams to attend.”

 

But Dasgupta believes the real divide runs even deeper — across India’s households. “There are really three Indias,” she says. “The first looks like us — families that can easily afford a PC for each child. The second buys the expensive phone or maybe a tablet, but not a PC. And the third, the majority, is where a computer just doesn’t make immediate economic sense.”

 

For that third India, HP is partnering with state governments to bring computers into classrooms instead. “In many government schools, a child gets maybe 15–20 minutes on a computer every two weeks. In the US or Europe, it’s 20 or 30 hours a week,” she says. “We’re helping set up AI labs in colleges and then working down to schools because we can’t miss the five- or six-year-olds who need to grow up as digital natives.”

 

She describes new collaborations with corporate entities to “adopt” villages by setting up PCs in schools and tracking learning outcomes over six months. “It’s the kind of thing our industry has never done before,” she says. “But if we don’t, the AI revolution will leave out exactly the people who could benefit from it most.” 

Ask her about her vision for HP India, and the answer is immediate: “I want to put a PC in the hands of every child in India.” It’s a deeply personal mission. “For me, that means building computer labs in government schools and putting devices in homes. There’s no reason why Dharavi shouldn’t have a computer in every household,” she says firmly. “We’re doing everything in our power — financing, capability building, government partnerships, investment, and proof-of-concept projects — to make it happen.” 

Her second priority is powering India Inc. “Indian enterprises are some of the most interesting and impressive conglomerates in the world,” she says. “I’ve removed the comfort of an MNC selling to another MNC. We’ve created a dedicated sales segment that focuses only on India Inc. and PSUs (public sector undertakings), working alongside them on technology adoption and nation-building opportunities.” 

The third pillar of her strategy is the MSME sector. “Only about 60 per cent of legitimate MSMEs even have one PC,” she says. “If there are 20 million such firms, that’s still a massive gap. We want to help them digitise and adopt AI.” A digitised MSME, she believes, is twice as profitable as a non-digitised one, everything else being equal. 

Her fourth focus area is collaboration with governments on India’s most urgent mandates: Education, skilling, and income generation. HP has been localising its approach for each state. “In Maharashtra, we’re building proof-of- concept projects in graphic design and media. In Tamil Nadu, it’s financial and IT skills. In Telangana, it’s coding and content creation.” With the State Bank of India, it is training rural women in basic IT skills. “The goal is to create a workforce that’s future-ready.”

 

The fifth and final priority, she says, is shaping India’s technology roadmap itself. “India has a massive skills gap. For  decades, we’ve tried to fix it through  traditional education. Now, we have to let technology drive it. We need to create the workforce that will power not just India’s growth, but the world’s.” 

As we near the end of our lunch, having chosen to skip dessert and coffee, I steer the conversation back to her career. If her career has often placed her in male-dominated industries, Dasgupta treats it as a matter of fact. “I’ve spent my whole life being the only woman in the room,” she says, recalling her time studying math and physics at Columbia — six women among a hundred students — and later working across oil and gas, aircraft engines, and tech consulting. “Computers and printers are actually easier than gas turbines,” she laughs. 

She’s clear-eyed about inequality. “When I first moved to India, I’d feel bad when women on panels said, ‘I’ve never faced discrimination,’ because younger women in the audience might think it’s their fault. I tell them, small things happen to me every week.” She recalls hotel staff addressing her male colleagues as ‘Sir’ while using her first name, or people suggesting that children at the office were evidence of a ‘woman MD (managing director) problem’. 

A slow change is happening, though. She smiles as she reflects on that change. 

“When I first got one of those ‘most powerful women’ awards, there were 25 of us. The next time, 40. This year, there were 100. That’s what feels great.”