There is something worth reconsidering about the phrase women’s empowerment. It appears in corporate reports, conferences, government programmes and social campaigns around the world. Its intention is positive and, in societies where women continue to face barriers to education, employment, finance and decision-making, the work behind it remains essential. But the language itself raises a question. If a woman already possesses intelligence, resilience, ambition and the ability to make decisions, does somebody else really need to give her power? Or does society need to remove the barriers that prevent her from exercising the power she already has?
The life of Nidhi Kar, originally from Uttarakhand, India, offers an interesting perspective on that question. She is a mother of three children, aged 10, 9 and 3. She is closely involved with UK-headquartered technology company Xpertnest, where she contributes to the operational side of a growing international business. She has also developed an identity through Earthnest, a sustainability venture working on plastic-free alternatives to conventional bags.
Her journey has taken her from Uttarakhand to Britain, from family life into business, from grassroots community initiatives to recognition at the House of Lords and, more recently, the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Yet perhaps the most revealing parts of her story are not the awards. They are the ordinary decisions made between them.
Before business, there was a family that treated equality as normal
Long before there were companies, international recognition or sustainability initiatives, Nidhi was the daughter of Vinod Futela and Shailly Futela and sister to Vishal Futela and Vivek Futela. Her parents remember an independent-minded child who was encouraged to have her own opinions. For Vinod Futela, there was never a conscious effort to “empower” his daughter. That would have suggested she started with something less. “Nidhi always had her own mind,” said Vinod Futela. “We wanted all our children to be educated, confident and capable of making their own decisions. We never thought that because she was our daughter her ambitions should be different or smaller.”
His perspective is uncomplicated. A daughter was entitled to precisely the same confidence as her sons. And sometimes equality begins not with a major intervention, but with what a family chooses to treat as ordinary. Her mother, Shailly Futela, views Nidhi’s journey less through awards and professional titles than through continuity of character.
“As a mother, I don't measure her success only through business or recognition,” she said. “I see her managing her children, relationships, responsibilities and work while still remaining herself. That makes me proud.” The words remaining herself carry particular significance. Women, especially after marriage and motherhood, are often described primarily through their relationships with other people. A daughter. A wife. A mother. The individual underneath those roles can sometimes disappear. Nidhi’s journey has been partly about refusing to let that happen. Growing up as a sister, not as “the girl” Her brothers remember much the same person. “We didn't grow up thinking Nidhi needed different rules because she was our sister,” said Vishal Futela. “She was independent, competitive and always clear about what she thought. If she disagreed with you, you generally knew about it.”
For Vivek Futela, another quality has remained consistent through the years. “What I have always seen in Nidhi is persistence,” he said. “Once she commits herself to something, she stays with it. Marriage, moving countries, children and business have all added responsibilities, but that determination hasn't really changed.” Their recollections are revealing precisely because they are not extraordinary. There was no grand programme designed to produce a confident woman. There was simply a family environment in which confidence was not treated as unusual for a daughter.
From Uttarakhand to a wider world
The connection with Uttarakhand has remained important even as Nidhi’s life moved to Britain. During 2025, she was involved with members of her family in grassroots outreach in Udham Singh Nagar, supporting vulnerable elderly people, women and children, including through the distribution of meals, winter clothing and footwear. Her parents Vinod and Shailly Futela, brothers Vishal and Vivek Futela and other members of the wider family were part of the initiative. That involvement gives another dimension to the family story. Service did not begin with a corporate social responsibility strategy. It existed much closer to home. Nidhi would later become associated with larger humanitarian initiatives, but the underlying idea remained relatively simple: if you can improve something for somebody else, you should.
Marriage, ambition and the problem with the word “support”
Nidhi is married to Capt. Arun Kar (Retd.), Founder of Xpertnest. Arun is naturally the more externally visible figure within the technology business. That visibility can create a familiar assumption: that one person leads while the spouse “supports”. The reality of entrepreneurial families is usually considerably more complicated. Roles change constantly. There are periods when one partner travels while another holds together life at home. There are moments when one person is consumed by a business crisis and another absorbs responsibilities elsewhere. And there are decisions where the person outside the spotlight may influence the outcome just as significantly as the person announcing it. Nidhi does not regard supporting her husband as inconsistent with her own independence. “Support has to work both ways,” she said. “There have been times when Arun needed me to take responsibility because his attention was completely somewhere else. There have also been times when he has made space for what I wanted to do.” “I don't believe marriage should be about keeping score.” Arun describes their relationship in similar terms.
“People may see me more because my role requires external visibility, but neither a family nor a business is built by one person,” said Capt. Arun Kar (Retd.). “Nidhi has challenged me when necessary, supported difficult decisions and taken responsibility when I simply couldn't be everywhere. I have never considered that standing behind me. She has always stood with me.”
That distinction is perhaps more important than the language of support itself.
With, rather than behind. Motherhood without the mythology of “having it all”
Nidhi and Arun are raising three children, now aged 10, 9 and 3. Much is written about whether ambitious women can “have it all”. Curiously, the same phrase is used far less frequently when discussing successful fathers. Men with children are rarely asked to explain in detail how they simultaneously manage parenthood, relationships and professional ambition. Successful women routinely are. The question can inadvertently establish an impossible standard: build a career, raise children, maintain relationships, manage a household and somehow make it all look effortless.
Nidhi makes no such claim. “I don't think balance means giving exactly the same amount of time to everything every day,” she said. “There are days when the children need more of you. There are days when work needs more of you. Sometimes your spouse needs your support and sometimes you need theirs.”
“The important thing is not losing yourself while managing all those responsibilities.” Her experience includes the realities familiar to millions of working parents. School commitments. Children falling ill when calendars are full. Business calls between family responsibilities. Plans changing without warning. And the guilt that can accompany both sides.
“I have felt guilty about work when I am with my children, and guilty about my children when I am working,” Nidhi said. “I think many mothers will understand exactly what that feels like.” It is perhaps a more useful account of modern motherhood than pretending perfect balance exists.
Motherhood as leadership training
Much debate focuses on what motherhood may take away from women's careers. Far less attention is paid to what it can add. Prioritisation. Negotiation. Patience. Emotional intelligence. Crisis management. Adaptability. Learning that identical approaches do not work with different people. Discovering that even the best plan can collapse before breakfast. “Having three children has definitely changed how I deal with people,” Nidhi said. “You understand much more quickly that everybody may be dealing with something you know nothing about.” She pauses when asked whether motherhood has made her more patient. “More patient, perhaps,” she says. “Not always patient.” That small qualification says considerably more than a polished statement about leadership might.
What colleagues see at Xpertnest
Away from the family relationship, colleagues describe Nidhi’s contribution through a different lens. At Xpertnest, technology, expansion and customer demands can naturally dominate conversations.
Chintan Panara, Founder of Xpertnest, says Nidhi frequently brings those discussions back to practical execution. “Entrepreneurs naturally focus on the next customer, the next technology and the next opportunity,” Panara said. “Nidhi often brings conversations back to people and execution — who is going to deliver this, what does it mean for the team and have we thought about what happens after the announcement?” It is leadership expressed through questions rather than speeches.
Pradip Butani, Founder of Xpertnest, sees something similar from another perspective. “People outside a business usually see growth through revenue, contracts and expansion,” Butani said. “Inside the organisation, growth means processes, financial discipline, people, working capital and hundreds of smaller decisions.” “Nidhi understands that less visible side of growth very naturally.”
For Rinki Singh, Chief Innovation Officer at Xpertnest, Nidhi also represents something broader. “We sometimes speak about women in leadership as though there is one model every woman should aspire to,” Singh said. “There isn't.” “One woman may want to build a company, another may lead technology, somebody else may make completely different choices at different stages of her life. What matters is that those choices genuinely belong to her.” Singh believes Nidhi’s strength comes partly from not trying to imitate a conventional leadership persona. “She doesn't need to be the loudest person in the room to influence what happens in it.”
Earthnest: turning sustainability into something practical
If Xpertnest represents one dimension of Nidhi’s professional life, Earthnest represents another. The sustainability venture has focused on alternatives to conventional plastic bags, including bio-bags designed to be plastic-free, biodegradable and compostable. Her earlier profile describes Earthnest’s work around reducing plastic-bag pollution and developing bio-bags using cassava starch and other natural additives. The work ultimately led to international recognition. In February 2025, Nidhi received the Women Entrepreneur Award in Sustainability at the World Leaders Conclave and Awards at the House of Lords in London. Yet inside Earthnest, the conversations are usually more practical.
Vishy, CEO of Earthnest, says Nidhi often returns to one deceptively simple question.
Will people actually use the alternative? “There can sometimes be a gap between talking about sustainability and making sustainability practical,” said Vishy. “Nidhi doesn't want this to remain a conversation at conferences or inside corporate presentations.” “Her question is usually: does it work for the customer?” For Vishy, environmental purpose and commercial reality cannot operate separately. “A sustainable product still has to perform. It has to be scalable. It has to make economic sense and people actually have to choose it over the conventional product.”
“Nidhi understands that purpose and business have to live in the same room.” That distinction matters. Plastic pollution is an enormous global problem. Yet changing behaviour can begin with something remarkably ordinary. A shopping bag. A piece of packaging. A purchasing decision repeated thousands or millions of times.
Recognition — and what happens the morning afterwards
Recognition has followed parts of Nidhi’s journey. Her earlier profile records sustainability awards for Earthnest and also describes her as a Guinness World Record holder, linked with the 2021 Running World Cup and charitable efforts supporting polio vaccination through UNICEF. In February 2026, another significant moment followed. Nidhi and Arun were honoured at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in connection with humanitarian initiatives aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Those initiatives included work spanning health, sanitation, inclusion, environmental responsibility and social impact. Among them was support towards a secure sanitation facility for 46 tribal girls in Nabarangpur, Odisha, addressing privacy, hygiene, dignity and safety.
The scale of that project was modest compared with the language often associated with global sustainability. Its impact was highly personal. And perhaps that is precisely the point.
“Recognition is encouraging because somebody has noticed the work,” Nidhi said. “But an award lasts for an evening.” “The following morning you go home. Your children still need you, the business still has challenges and whatever work you believed in before the award still needs to continue.” In a professional culture increasingly defined by announcements, that observation is worth considering. Awards are moments. Life takes place between them.
Do women need to be empowered?
The language of women's empowerment developed for good reason. Across the world, women continue to face barriers to education, capital, property ownership, leadership positions, workplace participation and personal choice. Removing those barriers remains essential. But perhaps there is a second stage in the conversation. A leadership programme does not suddenly give a woman intelligence. A promotion does not create resilience. An award does not manufacture ambition. Those qualities may have existed long before institutions decided to recognise them. “Nobody ever sat me down and told me, ‘You are empowered now,’” Nidhi said. “My parents gave me confidence. My family gave me space to have an opinion. Life gave me experiences, including difficult ones.” “Women already have tremendous strength. What matters is whether the environment around them allows that strength to be expressed.” Perhaps empowerment is therefore less about giving women power. And more about removing the things that prevent them from exercising it.
What three children are watching
Perhaps the most important audience for Nidhi’s story is neither an awards ceremony nor a newspaper readership. It is three children growing up inside the Kar household. Children form ideas about gender long before anyone sits down to explain equality to them. They notice who makes decisions. They notice whose career is considered important. They observe how their parents speak about one another. They see whether changing a family plan is automatically one parent's responsibility. They learn whether ambition and affection can comfortably coexist. And those observations eventually become expectations. For Nidhi, this may matter more than any professional recognition. “I want my daughter to grow up believing that ambition is completely normal for her,” she said. Then she adds something equally important. “And I want my sons to grow up believing that supporting an ambitious woman is completely normal too.” Because equality cannot be a conversation conducted only with daughters. Today's sons will become tomorrow's colleagues, managers, founders, partners and fathers. Their assumptions matter too.
A different definition of success
Nidhi Kar's journey has travelled a considerable distance from its beginnings in Uttarakhand. Across countries. Through marriage. Through motherhood three times over. Through technology and sustainability businesses. Through community initiatives. Through the House of Lords. And eventually to recognition at the United Nations Headquarters. Her earlier profile described her wider mission as helping women build business skills, self-confidence and self-discovery. Today, that idea perhaps deserves to be extended. Women may not need society to tell them they are powerful. They need parents who do not limit them. Brothers and families who treat equality as ordinary. Education that expands their choices. Partners who respect their ambitions. Workplaces willing to listen to their voices. Access to capital and opportunity. And communities prepared to accept that motherhood, marriage, ambition and individual identity do not have to cancel one another out. There is no perfect version of that life. Nidhi Kar does not claim to have discovered one. And perhaps that is exactly why her story resonates. It is not the story of a woman who claims to “have it all”. It is the story of a woman continuing to decide what matters, adapting as life changes and refusing to disappear inside any single role. Because empowerment may not ultimately be about transforming women into something they were not before. It may simply be about allowing the world to see what was already there.
