N Chandrasekaran takes over as Air India Chairperson

Natarajan Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Sons, has taken over as the Chairperson, Air India in a step towards reviving the erstwhile national carrier. Chandrasekaran had been elected to the Group’s Board. Air India will be the first of Tata’s three airlines to be helmed by Chandrasekaran as its first wholly-owned carrier. Chandrasekaran is expected to scrutinise the carrier’s progress, but the onus of turning around the airline will rest on the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Chandrasekaran was appointed as the seventh chairman of Tata Sons in January 2017 and joined the Board of Tata Sons in October 2016. Before that, he had worked for 30 years at TCS and was the consultancy’s CEO from 2009-2017. In addition to TCS, the new Air India Chairperson is on the boards of several group companies, including Tata Steel, Tata Motors, and Tata Power. Tata Sons have yet to appoint Air India’s CEO & MD. Currently, the airline's operations are being managed by five Tata executives, led by Senior Vice President, Nipun Aggarwal. Former Turkish Airlines Chairman, Ilker Ayci was last chosen to lead Air India but was met with criticisms, and he withdrew his candidacy on March 1, 2022.

Chandra Ganjoo

Chandra Ganjoo appointed as Group CEO, Trivitron Healthcare

Trivitron Healthcare has appointed Chandra Ganjoo as the Group Chief Executive Officer of the global medical technology company. She will be part of Trivitron’s centralised corporate leadership team that offers to guide, support, and monitor its Strategic Business Units (SBUs) in India, their three core verticals, and joint ventures, which have been further sub-divided into multiple verticals within the SBUs. Chandra is expected to bring in her unique experience and strong skills for leading Trivitron into its next phase of growth. She joined Trivitron in 1999 and has played various roles within the organisation. She started as a Manager with Trivitron’s Marketing wing, moving on to projects and key accounts, as Deputy GM HR & Admin, and was promoted as the Global HR Head & Corporate Marketing in 2012, and has been working her way up the corporate ladder. Before taking up the CEO’s post, her last role was that of the Group CPO, Executive Director and Head Corporate Communications from September 2016 to March 2022. In the last five years, she has risen to prominence as the company also underwent several transformations from a predominantly trading and distribution company to a global R&D and manufacturing MNC. She has enabled Trivitron’s global footprint and implemented its People, Process, and Performance goals.

Ashish K Jha

Ashish K Jha appointed to the White House

Dr Ashish K Jha, Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, has been appointed by U.S. President Joe Biden as the White House’s next Covid-19 Response Coordinator. Jha will be replacing Jeffrey D Zients, slated to leave the administration next month. Jha is a noted Indian-American public health expert and a practising physician. He has been the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health since 2020 and is considered a globally recognised expert on pandemic preparedness and response. President Biden’s statement said, “As we enter a new moment in the pandemic-executing on my National Covid-19 Preparedness Plan and managing the ongoing risks from Covid-Dr Jha is the perfect person for the job.” Born in 1970, Dr Jha hails from Bihar’s Pursaulia and initially migrated to Canada with his parents and nine years later to the United States in 1983. He is an alumnus of Columbia University with a B.A. in Economics and later received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He previously led the Harvard Global Health Institute and has been a professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. His work is largely focused on improving the U.S. healthcare system. He is known for his innovative research on Ebola and co-chaired an international commission on the global response to the Ebola outbreak. He holds over 200 empirical papers to his name and served as special assistant to the Department of Veterans Affairs secretary from 2009 to 2013.

Rohit Kapoor

OYO’s Kapoor, Tandon and Gupta to helm affairs

OYO, the global travel tech company, has promoted Rohit Kapoor as its Global Marketing Head from his current role as the CEO – India and Southeast Asia. Ankit Tandon, OYO’s Global Chief Business Officer, will take on the additional responsibility as the CEO for Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Middle East. Ankit Gupta will helm the Hotels and Homes division. Kapoor, Tandon, and Gupta will report to Ritesh Agarwal, the Founder & Group CEO, OYO. As the Global Marketing Head, Rohit will position OYO as a consumer-tech brand and increase its strategic position for leisure travellers and corporate customers and introduce the OYO brand to its European vacation homes business. It currently runs multiple brands across North European countries. As the CEO, Kapoor has been instrumental in OYO’s business model transformation in the past two years, enhancing margins from 5% to 18%. A seasoned professional with over 20 years of experience, Rohit joined OYO in December 2018 as the CEO of New Real Estate Businesses and quickly grew the company’s OYO LIFE and OYO Workspaces in India. In prior stints, he has helmed leadership positions across sales and finance with Max India Limited and was the Executive Board Member at Max Healthcare for close to five years. Rohit has been associated for about a decade with Mckinsey & Company. Rohit is an alumnus of the Indian School of Business and has recently been featured as one of ISB’s most influential alumni in the book “ISB Portraits.” He is also a certified Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA Institute, USA).

Ajay Sehgal

Lenovo ropes in Vodafone’s Ajay Sehgal as the ED

Lenovo has roped in Vodafone’s Ajay Sehgal as the Executive Director (ED) for its India Commercial Business. To be based out of Mumbai, Sehgal is expected to drive growth for Lenovo India’s Commercial PC and Smart Devices business and steer its GTM transformation for its Infrastructure Solutions and Service & Solutions businesses. Before joining Lenovo, Sehgal was the Executive Vice President, Enterprise Business with Vodafone. He brings 25 years of experience and expertise in smart cities, Cloud, Data centres, and IoT technologies and has mobilised B2B marketing, digital platforms for customer acquisition and life-cycle management, and built strategic partnerships/alliances and startup ecosystems. His career domains were designing and deploying business strategies, new businesses, M&A execution, digitalisation, and brand building across the consumer and enterprise go-to-market segments. In previous stints, he was the Country Manager Sales with HP and Regional Sales Manager with Xerox in his initial career. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta, and Leadership Program with Stanford University.

Ranjit Rath

Ranjit Rath appointed as CMD, Oil India

The Public Enterprises Selection Board (PESB) has appointed Ranjit Rath as the Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) to helm Oil India Ltd, the country’s second-largest state oil and gas producer. Rath will be replacing Sushil Chandra Mishra, Oil India’s current Chairman and Managing Director who will superannuate on June 30, 2022. Ranjit Rath will step down from his current role as the Chairman and MD, Mineral Exploration Corporation Ltd (MECL), under the Ministry of Mines. Rath has headed MECL, the mini-Ratna central public sector enterprise, since November 2018. A geoscientist, and an alumnus of IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur, and Utkal University, Rath was the General Manager of engineering consultancy firm, Engineers India Ltd, New Delhi, and was previously posted to the Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd. A recipient of the prestigious National Geosciences Award 2016 from the President of India, Rath has co-authored the book 'Underground Storage Technologies' and also published several technical papers.

Prabhakar Patil

Ola Electric onboards former LG Chem CEO

Ola Electric has roped in Prabhakar Patil, the former CEO of LG Chem Power, and an expert EV battery designer, to mobilise Ola’s large-scale battery manufacturing goals. In his previous corporate stints, the Michigan-based Patil has held senior positions with LG Chem Power Inc. and Ford Motor Company. He is on the advisory board of top-end companies, including Ashok Leyland, Addionics, Epsilon, Unifrax, and others. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Bombay), he holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan. Ola has been investing in R&D for creating indigenous advanced cell technologies, and Patil’s presence is expected to accelerate Ola’s plans. Ola hopes to gain from Patil’s expertise in designing batteries for some of the leading EVs worldwide. Patil hopes to support Ola’s quest to transform and sustain Ola’s initiative in enhancing India’s electric mobility system. Ola has applied for the Indian Government’s $2.4 billion PLI scheme for developing advanced cells and proposes to set up a cutting-edge cell manufacturing facility with up to 50GWh capacity. Patil’s deep-dive knowledge is expected to steer CEO, Bhavish Aggarwal’s objective of bringing indigenously designed and manufactured cells to the market.

Anil Ambani resigns from the board of Reliance Power and Reliance Infra

Anil Ambani

Anil Ambani, Director of Reliance Power & Reliance Infra and Chairperson Reliance Group, resigns following SEBI ban order. Following Ambani’s resignation, Rahul Sarin, a retired civil servant and former Secretary to the Government of India, will head affairs as an additional director with the two Reliance companies. Anil Ambani’s resignations have been conveyed to the Bombay Stock Exchange in their regulatory filings stating that the move was made in compliance with an interim order passed by SEBI over allegations that he and three other associates had siphoned off funds from Reliance Home Finance Limited (RHFL). Market watchers said that Anil Ambani’s resignation need not be long-term as the SEBI order is an interim ruling, and the matter is pending further investigations. In case findings prove that Anil Ambani did not engage in any financial irregularities at RHFL or a court stays the SEBI order; he will most likely return to the Boards of the two listed companies.

Meesho onboards Harsh Chaudhary as CXO Monetisation

Harsh Chaudhary

Indian internet commerce platform Meesho has onboarded former Disney+Hotstar’s Harsh Chaudhary as Chief Experience Officer (CXO) for monetisation. Harsh will lead the team for enhanced revenue generation across Meesho’s various business units. His role involves designing and executing the blueprint for monetising Meesho’s business model. Harsh, known for spearheading and scaling business growth, is expected to steer the platform’s MSMEs digitisation, bring in the next billion online users, and make monetisation an integral part of Meesho’s growth. In his previous role with Disney+Hotstar, he led the teams across growth partnerships, strategy, and analytics which helped build the video subscription monetisation for the streaming platform. Besides Disney+ Hotstar, his previous stints involved leadership positions with multiple brands such as Myntra and McKinsey and Company. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta and the Indian Institute of Technology-Roorkee.