Ronnie Screwvala

Screwvala was born in Bombay into a Parsi family. His father was an executive at the British firm J L Morrison and Smith & Nephew. Screwvala schooled and went to college in Mumbai at Cathedral and John Connon School and Sydenham College. Screwvala had a keen interest in theatre while in school and acted in professional plays with Bombay theatre as a hobby. He played notable roles in Shakespeare’s Othello and Death of a Salesman.

Opportunistic in the early days of his entrepreneurship, Screwvala founded a toothbrush manufacturing company. Screwvala’s is also credited with pioneering Cable TV in India (1981) at a time when there was a single terrestrial channel (Doordarshan) and grew that to multiple cities and most of the hotel chains in India.

RSVP is Screwvala’s re-entry into the media and entertainment industry. This time is focussed on developing its own scripts and screenplays and working with directors that share the common vision of storytelling.

From 2013 onwards he and his wife scaled their Non Profit The Swades Foundation whose goal is to work with a million people in rural India, empower them and move them out of poverty every 6–7 years and then move to another geography. Has co-founded UpGrad which is into Online Education in the higher education and specialization sector, built a Sports company (U Sports) spanning Football / E Sports and Kabaddi, re-entered the media content space to build a creative content company in Movies and Digital Content (RSVP), authored a Book titled Dream with Your Eyes Open and through his investment company Unilazer Ventures he has been a significant private equity investor in Indian start ups with early stage investment and significant minority stakes.

Based in Mumbai, India, Ronnie pioneered Cable Television, built a Media and Entertainment conglomerate (UTV Software Communications) that partnered with News Corp, 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Company and Bloomberg and later in 2012 he divested the company to Disney for an enterprise value of US$1.4 billion.

He has been named on Esquire's List of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century and ranked 78 among the 100 most influential people in the world on the Time 100 (compiled by Time Magazine, 2009). He was also listed amongst 25 Asia’s Most Powerful people by Fortune Magazine. and titled the Jack Warner of India by Newsweek.

Screwvala founded UTV and over the period grew it into a media conglomerate spanning a leading movie studio, a Games Studio and creative content company that went public and listed on stock exchanges in 2005 and into which Disney gradually took a substantial stake until he divested the whole company to them in 2012. He has discussed the growth of his business at length in a recent interview for Harvard Business School's Creating Emerging Markets project.

Rohinton Soli "Ronnie" Screwvala (born 8 September 1962) is a first generation Indian entrepreneur and philanthropist.