Nita Ambani, becomes the first South Asian to be honoured by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York for her philanthropic work in the areas of education, sports, healthcare, rural transformation, urban renewal, disaster response, women’s empowerment and promotion of the arts. The Met, recognised as one of the most iconic museums in the world, is currently located at three celebrated sites of New York -The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters -and houses over 5,000 years of art from around the world. The Met was impressed by the diversity and scale of the work carried out by the founder and chairperson, Reliance Foundation, Nita Ambani. The direction she gives the foundation has helped it to focus its work on sustainable urban and rural transformation as well as healthcare, education, grassroots development through sport, and women’s empowerment, according to a statement. The foundation supports Indian art and aims to take it across the globe. It has benefited over 10 million Indians, touching the lives of individuals across over 10,500 urban and rural areas. Nita Ambani said, “I am delighted and humbled by this honour for our work at Reliance Foundation. It is truly gratifying that our efforts, especially in education, sports, health and rural transformation are bringing smiles to millions of people. This recognition from a distinguished global institution like The Met is a tribute to our commitment towards sustainable development and social empowerment, and will inspire each one of us at Reliance Foundation to constantly do the best to make the world a better place for the next generation.” Nita Ambani’s work in developing sports in India was recognised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which elected her as its first Indian woman member, and she is the only member from India in the IOC.
Anil Kumar Misra has joined the Noida headquartered Magicbricks as its CHRO. Misra had recently quit Fidelity National Financial, where he was vice president & chief human resources officer. Getting back into the online business domain, after having worked with Just Dial for about two years earlier, Misra is the first ever CHRO at Magicbricks. Its head-HR, Anupama Beri continues while Misra joins in. “The new role has been created in line with the company’s ambitious plans in terms of business revenues and their presence in the market,” reports said, quoting Misra. Misra brings in 13 years of experience across industries and companies including Just Dial, Tesco, Patni Computer Systems and the Oberoi Group of Hotels in the past. A science graduate and a doctorate in performance management from the Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi, Misra will be responsible for the entire HR processes in addition to leading the creation of an excellence centre for development of capability and leadership in the company.
The B M Birla Science Prize for Chemistry 2015 award was recently given to Rahul Banerjee, a scientist from CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory (CSIR-NCL), for developing a methodology of synthesising porous covalent organic frameworks with exceptional chemical stability for gas storage and proton conduction. This is a major breakthrough in porous material research, as these materials have the porosity and crystallinity of metal organic frameworks and also exceptional chemical stability of traditional porous zeolites or carbons. The award has been instituted by BM Birla Science Centre, Hyderabad. Banerjee joined CSIR-NCL’s Physical and Materials Chemistry Division in 2008 after completing his post-doctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published more than 120 research papers in international journals, and has many citations to his credit. Banerjee is also the recipient of the Humboldt Research Fellowship 2016, and the Thomson Reuters Research Excellence-India Citation Award 2015.
Tata Motors Ltd’s Managing Director and chief executive, Guenter Butschek recently announced new roles and responsibilities for its top brass. The exercise is aimed at reducing the number of management layers to speed up decisions. The new structure, which allocates roles based on product lines, will be effective very soon, and reduce the layers to five from the current 14. The former chief executive at the Airbus Group SA, who completed a year at the Tata group flagship recently, has been tasked with turning around the fortunes of a company that has seen domestic passenger car sales and market share roughly halve in the past two years, with profit boosted mainly by its UK unit, Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Plc. Girish Wagh, in-charge of project planning and programme management in the passenger vehicle (PV) business unit will head the medium and heavy commercial vehicle (CV) business. Ramki Ramakrishnan, vice-president for the CV business, will head the customer care and after-sales services for CVs. Anil Sinha, head of manufacturing operations for passenger cars, will lead the quality function of the company’s CV business, sources said. The top two levels (L1 and L2) of managers will be responsible for execution of strategies formulated by an executive panel, comprising the managing director, function and business heads. Tata Motors has picked close to 120 high performers for the L1 and L2 positions.
Ola has announced the appointment of PepsiCo’s Vishal Kaul as its chief operating officer (COO) replacing Pranay Jivrajka, the taxi app’s first employee. Jivrajka has been appointed as a founding partner, and will continue to work closely with Ola’s co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, the company said. Kaul will head Ola’s operations and expand its reach. The mobility opportunity is massive with over 300 million trips happening every single day in urban India. Ola’s operations are currently spread across 100 cities. “I am delighted to join Ola and be part of solving mobility needs,” said Kaul, on his appointment.
Sanjiv Puri was appointed as the chief operating officer (COO) after leading the FMCG business of the conglomerate as President from 2014. Diversified group ITC is taking steps to elevate its COO Sanjiv Puri as chief executive officer and plans to split the post of executive chairman and CEO after incumbent Y C Deveshwar stepped aside earlier this year. In a regulatory filing, ITC has said that its nomination and compensation committee at its meeting took up the matter splitting up the role of the executive chairman of the company between chairman and chief executive officer in the month of February. Puri joined the company in 1986. Deveshwar steps aside as executive chairman and CEO, after two decades of holding the posts. He is now a non-executive director and chairman of the company for a period of three years.
Hindustan Unilever appointed Dev Bajpai as a director on the board of the company. Bajpai (51) was appointed executive director (legal) and company secretary and as a member of the management committee of the company in May 2010 and took on additional responsibility of corporate affairs in 2012. Prior to joining HUL, Bajpai has worked in Maruti Udyog, Marico, The Indian Hotels and ICICI Venture Funds Management.
Nitin Rakesh takes charge as Mphasis CEO from Ganesh Ayyar with private equity giant Blackstone Group, the new owner of the Bengaluru-headquartered IT services provider, rejigging operations to leapfrog the digital transformation story in its mainstay US market. Rakesh stepped down as CEO of Nasdaq-listed Syntel abruptly in November after being at the helm for two and half years. He, who was instrumental in driving Syntel’s IT automation platform SyntBots to offset cost pressure in the traditional business, has held multiple roles including president of Americas and head of its North American operations. “The combination of Nitin’s professional track record as CEO of a US-listed, BFSI-focused IT services company and personal qualities of creativity and collaboration is ideal to lead Mphasis in its next phase of growth,” said Amit Dixit, director of Mphasis and co-head of Blackstone Private Equity in India
Last year, the world’s largest private equity firm Blackstone Group had announced a $1.1-billion deal to acquire Hewlett Packard’s 60.5 percent stake in Mphasis, factoring in the payout to minority shareholders. Blackstone Group concluded the acquisition of Mphasis for $825 million after the open offer to public shareholders fizzled out. Ayyar, who has been CEO since 2009, had been in office for eight years before his contract came up for renewal in January.
Serving Wipro for two decades, vice-chairman T K Kurien calls it quits with the company, after straddling different roles in the $7.5-billion IT firm. He will leave ahead of the end of his current tenure, which ends in March. TK, as he was fondly addressed, served as Wipro CEO for five years before being elevated as its vice-chairman early last year. TK has invested in a few startups in the artificial intelligence (AI) space and in mobile payments startup ToneTag.
This is not the first time KT sought to leave the company, but the board asked him to stay with the firm for his full-term. But despite the hard work and despite being the hard taskmaster, everybody in Wipro are of the opinion that Kurien struggled to make the company grow. Revenue growth was way short of those of its peers.
Wipro’s high exposure to the oil & gas industry proved to be a handicap when oil prices slumped. And Kurien couldn’t get other sectors to make up for this loss. Meanwhile, automation and newer technologies like cloud, mobile and AI began to redefine the way IT services were being delivered. And Kurien had to restructure the company to deal with this.
Phil Fersht, CEO of IT advisory HfS Research, said Kurien injected a great deal of focus on automation, analytics and digital technologies, overseeing the early days of Holmes (AI platform) development and setting the seeds for the DesignIT investment (Danish design firm acquired for ₹595 crore in 2015) and the smooth succession of Abid (Abidali Neemuchwala) to CEO. Jessie Paul, founder of marketing advisory firm Paul Writer and who was previously chief marketing officer at Wipro, said Kurien put in place processes and operational efficiency in what was seen as a happy-go-lucky business.
Dr Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar, a technocrat who is considered the father of the Indian supercomputer, has been appointed the new Vice-Chancellor of Nalanda University, Rajgir, Bihar. President Pranab Mukherjee, in his capacity as visitor to Nalanda University, named Bhatkar for the post. He will hold the office for a three-year period from the date of his appointment as per the Nalanda University Act, Sec. 11(3). Bhatkar, 70, replaces Gopa Sabharwal who resigned last year, followed by the resignation of Chancellor George Yeo, after the dissolution of the Mentor Group which functioned as the governing body of the university. Born on October 11, 1946 in Pune, Bhatkar was educated at IIT, Delhi, Sir Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur and MS University, Vadodara. He is known as the architect of India’s initiative in supercomputing, the Centre of Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune founded in 1988, leading to the development of the first indigenous supercomputer Param 8000 in 1991, followed by Param 10000 in 1998. He has also served as member, Scientific Advisory Committee to the Cabinet at the Centre, and governing board of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He has also been honoured with the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan, the fourth and third highest civilian honours in India. Established in year 2010 as a Central University, Nalanda University is spread over a 443-acres campus and started offering academic programmes in 2014. It is a dream project of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.
Centrum Capital Ltd hired co-founder and managing director of private equity (PE) fund Blue River Capital, Shujaat Khan to head it. Khan will be managing director and head of the asset management businesses at Centrum. Khan will head strategy, governance, fund raising and investment decisions at the alternative asset business. It plans to raise funds from high net worth individuals and family offices, and institutions in India and abroad. Centrum currently manages a private equity fund—Kalpavriksh— and co-manages real estate funds along with India Property Advisors Ltd (IPAL). “At Centrum, we have a plan of setting up a large alternative asset management platform, bringing current PE funds and new alternative investment funds (AIFs) under a single roof. We will launch AIFs for structured credit and distressed debt funds,” Khan said recently. “Global as well as Indian investors have an appetite for investments in Indian alternative assets and we want to use such interest from high net worth individuals, family offices and corporate groups to create an opportunity in pooling all such investment options under one roof,” he added. Prior to co-founding Blue River Capital, Khan was a managing director and investment committee member at ChrysCapital LLC. Earlier, he was an investment banker with Merrill Lynch International, based in Singapore, working on mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance transactions across Asia, including India.
Flipkart’s new CEO, Kalyan Krishnamurthy has his task cut out as he is left with just three senior leaders to steer the day-to-day operations after a spate of senior management exits. In all, as many as 12 Flipkart senior management staff have now left the e-commerce firm over the past one year. Two more senior executives, engineering heads Hari Vasudev and Ashish Agrawal have resigned, joining three others who left earlier. In all, as many as 12 Flipkart leaders at the level of senior vice-president, the second-highest executive rank, have now left the company over the past year. Krishnamurthy’s leadership team now comprises newly promoted chief operating officer Nitin Seth, chief technology officer Ravi Garikapati, another engineering head Ravi Krishnaswamy, apart from finance controller Rajnish Baweja. All of the other leadership roles in functions including finance, legal, product and categories at the company are unoccupied, raising questions about Flipkart’s ability to manage its businesses and whether Krishnamurthy will be stretched too thin as CEO. Krishnamurthy directly oversees Flipkart’s retail and advertising businesses and is also steering Ekart, the company’s massive logistics arm (though this is formally under Seth).
by Joe Williams
