India's best-performing CEOs: We present 25 top leaders of corporate India, who through long stints shepherded a range of companies and took them to greater heights

We define a CEO as the person holding the highest executive position in a specific listed company. For example, we identified Bhaskar Bhat (No. 4 on our list) as the CEO of Titan Industries and not Ratan Tata who is the head of the Tata business group that Titan Industries belongs to. Our ranking highlights the performance of the CEO irrespective of whether he/she is a professional manager (e.g., R. Sridhar, CEO of Shriram Transport Finance, No. 6), a member of the founding family (e.g., [Mukesh Ambani], CEO of Reliance Industries, No. 7), or the original founderentrepreneur (e.g., Sunil Mittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, No. 5). Indian companies use terms like 'Managing Director', 'Executive Chairman' or 'Chairman and Managing Director' to identify the highest executive position; we researched on a case by case basis to identify the leader of the operating company in question, not the leader of the business group that the operating company might be affiliated with. The No. 1 CEO on our list is of Jindal Steel and Power, or JSPL, the most valuable steel company in India today with annual revenues of about Rs 13,200 crore, or approximately $2.6 billion. An MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas, Naveen Jindal acquired control over the ailing Raigarh plant of the Jindal group when his father, Om Prakash Jindal, arranged an amicable four-way split of his business empire between his four sons in 1998. Naveen Jindal's remarkable turnaround of the Raigarh sponge iron mill through a backward integration strategy led JSPL to cheaply acquire access to valuable raw materials such as coal and iron ore at a time when competitors were paying much less attention to these inputs. This strategy insulated JSPL from price volatility in commodity markets, thus bringing down production costs and boosting profitability. Buoyed by this success, JSPL has now set very ambitious decade-long targets of scaling up annual steel production six-fold to 20 million tonnes. The company also plans to become a large power producer by scaling up almost 15 times to deliver a generating capacity of 15 gigawatts of power. In addition, JSPL has significant investment plans for its iron ore mines in Bolivia. During his tenure, Naveen Jindal has delivered a staggering total shareholder return, or TSR, of 13,784 per cent, increasing JSPL's market capitalisation by some Rs 60,600 crore (about $12.1 billion). Our top-performing CEO, Naveen Jindal, who started at the helm of JSPL in his 30s after secur