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Mr. Sunil D’Souza is the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Tata Consumer Products, with over three decades of experience in the consumer goods industry. He is widely recognized for driving strategic transformation, large-scale integrations, innovation, portfolio expansion, and sustained stakeholder value creation.

He began his career as an engineer with Siemens India before pursuing management education at IIM Calcutta. After graduating, he joined Hindustan Lever as a management trainee in 1993, and subsequently worked with Standard Chartered and Coca-Cola. He later joined PepsiCo, where he spent 15 years in senior leadership roles across Food and Beverages in Asia.

During this period, he lived in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, where he created and scaled the business in North Vietnam, drove innovation-led growth in the Philippines, operationalized the Suntory joint venture in Vietnam, initiated bottling operations in Myanmar post-sanctions, restructured the Indonesia business, and delivered some of PepsiCo’s highest global growth rates.

In 2015, Mr. D’Souza returned to India as Managing Director of Whirlpool India Ltd., transforming it into a major growth story. Under his leadership, the company’s market capitalization tripled in 4.5 years and it featured among India’s top 100 wealth creators (Motilal Oswal, 2014–19).

He joined the newly formed Tata Consumer Products in 2020 to lead the Tata Group’s FMCG ambitions, repositioning the company from a commodity-led business to a branded consumer products powerhouse through portfolio expansion, distribution strengthening, digitization, and innovation. He also serves on the Boards of Tata Starbucks and Tata Digital.

An engineering graduate from the University of Madras, he was the “Glaxo Marketing Scholar” of IIM Calcutta’s 28th batch. Mr. D’Souza is married to Jyoti, a mathematics teacher, and has two daughters. A former competitive sportsman, he continues to enjoy running and following sports.

Mr. Sandeep Kumar Kalra has built an illustrious career spanning over three decades in the global IT services industry, marked by progressive leadership and transformative impact.

He began his career with the HCL Group on the hardware side, leading business development across the National Capital Region, before joining Samsung Electronics’ India liaison office, where he launched multiple IT products and established a nationwide distribution network. He later re-joined HCL Technologies in its IT services business, rising to senior global leadership roles by the mid-2000s. At HCL, he played a key role in expanding operations in Latin America and Canada and built a strong global footprint in the pharmaceutical, biotech, and life sciences sectors.

In 2011, Mr. Kalra joined Symphony Teleca as a senior executive, driving growth across software, mobile, and embedded solutions, and contributing significantly to its acquisition by HARMAN in 2015.

He joined Persistent Systems in May 2019 as President of Technology Services and Board Member, and was appointed CEO and Executive Director in October 2020. Under his leadership, Persistent has grown from $480 million in FY19 to $1.4 billion in FY24, achieving over 20% CAGR, with a target of $2 billion by FY27. He has led seven strategic acquisitions and strengthened partnerships with Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and AWS, elevating Persistent to a top-8 listed IT company in India by revenue and market capitalization.

Based in Pennsylvania, USA, Mr. Kalra is recognized with several awards, including “Tech Titan” (Business Today, 2025), Best CEO (Institutional Investor Asia, 2025), and Best CEO in IT Services (Fortune India, 2024). He is also actively engaged in philanthropy and community impact initiatives.

Mr. Ajay Jain is an accomplished entrepreneur, corporate leader, and educator with over four decades of experience in Indian and global businesses. He has successfully led turnarounds, driven international expansion, and built ventures in the Cleantech and sustainability space, earning recognition as a leading expert in sustainability and water management.

Deeply committed to IIM Calcutta, his engagement spans more than three decades. He has served the alumni community in leadership roles — as President of the Alumni Associations in Delhi and Mumbai, and as Vice President in Chennai — strengthening connections and networks. He has also contributed to the Institute’s growth and innovation ecosystem as a Member of the Board of Governors and as Chairman of IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, guiding its mission to nurture start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Mr. Jain’s corporate career includes leadership roles at SRF Group and Raymond, and more than 15 years as a business head before returning to entrepreneurship. He has founded businesses in Kuwait in the 1980s and established two ventures in India. A lifelong social worker, he supports education for underprivileged girls and youth empowerment in rural communities.

Actively involved in accelerator programs and innovation initiatives, he has addressed multiple forums on entrepreneurial thinking and taught at institutions including IIM Calcutta, IIM Trichy, and the Great Lakes Institute of Management. True to his belief that “a leader must develop other leaders,” he has inspired students and professionals who now lead in India and abroad. He enjoys music and travel.

Dr. Balasubramaniam Ramesh is a Regents’ Professor and George E. Smith Eminent Scholar’s Chair at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he also chairs the Department of Computer Information Systems. An internationally recognized information systems scholar, his research pioneers AI-enabled approaches to knowledge-intensive processes in complex organizations, spanning requirements engineering and traceability, agile software development, and responsible AI. Dr. Ramesh is ranked among the top 1.2% of information systems researchers worldwide for career impact.

His pioneering work in requirements traceability introduced models and AI-driven approaches that transformed complex system design. These models are embedded in major research and commercial tools, including product lifecycle platforms used by organizations such as NASA, Apple, Tesla, Raytheon, and BASF. In recognition of the real-world impact of this work, he received the 2023 Association for Information Systems (AIS) Impact Award, one of only three individual awards worldwide for practice-influential research.

Dr. Ramesh’s research has secured over 25 competitive grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, DoD, DARPA, and industry partners including Google. He co-directs a DoD Center of Excellence in responsible AI and leads a Google-funded AI education consortium with MIT. An acclaimed teacher and mentor, he has received the University System of Georgia’s Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award and guided nearly forty doctoral students.

Mr. Gaurav Deepak co-founded M/s Avendus Capital Private Limited in 1999 and has served as its Chief Executive Officer since 2020. Over the past twenty-five years, he has helped build Avendus into one of India’s most respected and diversified financial services firms, spanning across investment banking, institutional equities, asset and wealth management, and credit solutions — all focused on empowering India’s entrepreneurial economy.

An alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IIM Calcutta, Mr. Deepak combines strategic discipline with entrepreneurial drive. His leadership philosophy is rooted in growing the organisation around talent, doing the right thing, and striving for excellence, innovation, and scale — principles that have guided Avendus’s evolution and shaped its impact on India’s financial landscape.

He is deeply passionate about the role of entrepreneurship in driving India’s growth story and about building institutions that combine purpose with performance. Under his leadership, M/s Avendus Capital Private Limited has become a trusted partner to many of the country’s most dynamic entrepreneurs and investors, united by a commonly shared belief in long-term value creation and innovation.

Beyond work, Mr. Deepak enjoys spending time with his family and friends, travelling and pursuing his passion for sports. Known for his curiosity and love of stories, he often draws from cinema and books to distil complex ideas into simple, relatable insights.

Dr. Rajesh Tandon is a distinguished scholar-practitioner in participatory development and governance. He holds a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from IIM Calcutta (Gold Medalist). While pursuing his PhD in Organisational Behaviour at Case Western Reserve University, USA, his fieldwork among tribal farmers in southern Rajasthan inspired a lifelong commitment to transparent, accountable delivery of public services for the poor and excluded.

In 1982, he founded PRIA, a pioneering civil society organisation applying management principles to participatory research, training, and organisational development. PRIA promoted community participation across literacy, women’s empowerment, primary health care, water, and sanitation. Dr. Tandon’s work influenced government programmes, leading the Planning Commission of India to integrate beneficiary participation in social development initiatives; its participatory micro-planning guidelines for Panchayats and Nagarpalikas are based on PRIA models.

He led national efforts to build capacity of over one million elected Panchayat leaders, especially women, incubated more than 300 grassroots organisations, and contributed to national and international policies on civil society partnerships. He has served on advisory panels of the World Bank, ADB, UNDP, and UNESCO, and supported community-engaged learning under India’s National Education Policy and internationally.

Dr. Tandon is founder or co-founder of several global civil society platforms, including VANI, CIVICUS, and the Forum for Democratising Global Governance, and serves as Co-Chair of the UNESCO Chair in Community-based Research. He has received numerous honours, authored 15 books, and is the first Indian inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame and the Academy of Engagement Scholarship.