Lila Poonawalla, née Lila Thadani, was born on 16 September 1944 in Hyderabad in the Sindh region in British India as one of the five children in a Sindhi family. She lost her father when she was three years old and, during the partition of India, her family moved to India as refugees to settle in Pune. She did her early education in Pune after which she graduated in mechanical engineering with first class from the Government College of Engineering under the University of Pune in 1967.
