Sangeeta Niranjan

Sangeeta Niranjan is an Indo-Fijian businesswoman. She is the co-founder of Kenns Motors, the President of the Fiji Motor Traders Association, and a former President of the Fiji Employers Federation, a position to which she was elected on 3 September 2005. She resigned from this position on 30 October 2006. [http://www.fijilive.com/archive/show/member/news/2006/10/30/30fijilive11.html]

Education and career

Niranjan was educated at Saint Joseph's Secondary School and then the University of the South Pacific in Suva. She began studying science, but switched to economics at the request of her husband-to-be, Michael Niranjan, whom she met as a 16-year-old student. She has since undertaken postgraduate studies, and graduated in November 2005 with a Masters degree in business administration from the University of Queensland.

Employers Federation President

On 3 September 2005, Niranjan became the first woman to be elected President of the Fiji Employers Federation in its 45-year history. She declared that the promotion of free trade and commerce and the maintenance of "a strong, dynamic, and profitable private sector" would be among her priorities, and that she would work for greater cooperation between employers, trade unions, and government organizations.

Fijian Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase congratulated Niranjan on her election, and said that it reflected a national effort to bring about greater equality between the sexes.

Personal life

Niranjan was the only child in a family of North Indian descent. Her grandparents, who were school teachers, were among the sixty thousand-odd Indians who emigrated to Fiji between 1879 and 1916. Her parents were both Fiji-born.

In 1984, she married Michael Niranjan, the scion of a wealthy business family. Sangeeta and Michael Niranjan have three children. In 1995, the couple founded Kenns Motors, specializing in upper class vehicles. In establishing Kenns Motors, they broke away from Niranjan Autoport, the family business owned by Michael Niranjan's parents, causing a family rift which attracted considerable media publicity at the time. This feud has since been resolved. "Things have been patched up," Niranjan says.

Niranjan pays tribute to her mother, a school principal, and her mother-in-law, former Suva City Councilor Pramodini Niranjan, for breaking the traditional mould of the domestic housewife and modelling the image of the successful career woman. It was at the urging of her mother-in-law (who now lives in Australia), she told the Fiji Times on 18 September 2005, that she decided to study for a postgraduate degree.

One of her favourite hobbies is rose gardening. She also enjoys swimming, tramping, and reading biographies of inspirational people. She has participated in charity work in the past, working at the Home of Compassion as a teenager and later serving with the Rotary Club and the National Diabetes Foundation. In her clothing tastes, she prefers Indian-made saris to business suits, but has eschewed gold and diamond jewellery since the robbery of her home in the Suva suburb of Tamavua in 2001.