JURY MEMBER
Committee Chairman
R Chandrashekhar is a highly respected and well recognized public figure in the IT and Telecom sectors, both in India and internationally. He is currently the Chairman of the Centre for The Digital Future, based at Gurugram. Additionally, he is associated with several organizations in advisory roles and Board positions. As a former Secretary to the Government of India for Electronics and IT, Chairman of the Telecom Commission of India and Secretary Telecom and later as President, NASSCOM (National Association for Software and Services Companies) he possesses a unique breadth of expertise and experience, both in the Government and private sector, that covers the entire gamut of the IT and Telecom sectors. He was a member of the country’s premier Indian Administrative Service since 1975. He retired from Government service in 2013 with an impeccable record studded with many accomplishments in the field of IT, Electronics and Telecom.
He is a strong advocate of progressive and open policies that are good for the industry and the country and enable faster adoption of technology, development of the domestic market and acceleration of innovation. He was the principal architect of the triad of policies consisting of the National Policy on Electronics, 2012 aimed at promoting Electronic System Design and Manufacturing and R&D and the National Policy on IT, 2012 and the National Telecom Policy, 2012.
Chandrashekhar has extensive experience in Government of formulating and implementing policies, strategies and action plans to foster the growth of the Telecom and IT industry covering the entire enabling eco-system including infrastructure, Human Resource Development, e-governance and establishing Public Private Partnerships. He has a deep understanding of the issues and problems related to transformational ICT project implementation. In his role as President, NASSCOM, representing the country’s legendary IT industry, he was a strong and effective advocate of forward-looking policies that powered the country’s transition to a digital economy and a global IT powerhouse.
He has rich first-hand experience in pivotal positions of the processes of liberalization, privatization and globalization both at the state and central levels. He is widely travelled and has a deep understanding and feel for cultural diversity and management issues in a multi-cultural and international milieu. USA, UK, EU, Japan, China, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore are some of the countries which he has extensively engaged with, both at Government and industry levels. He has been a member/ leader of innumerable delegations to other countries and has wide experience in bilateral and multi-lateral negotiations, business negotiations as well as industry – Government dialogue and policy advocacy across multiple geographies.
Director
Professor Himanshu Rai is the Director of IIM Indore. Prior to that he was teaching at IIM Lucknow, which he had rejoined from 1 September 2016 after a leave of two years. In this 2-year period (1 September 2014 to 31 August 2016), Himanshu was the Dean, MISB Bocconi (India Campus of Bocconi, Milan), and Professor, SDA Bocconi School of Management, Milan, Italy. Professor Himanshu Rai is an educationist – an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), he has been teaching PG and Doctoral students at Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIML) since 2006. His core area is Human Resource Management, wherein he focuses on Negotiation; Mediation; Arbitration; Strategic HRM; and Leadership. He frequently conducts training programmes and workshops for executives as well as bureaucrats around the world. He has earlier taught in the HR area at XLRI Jamshedpur. As the Convener of CAT 2010, he successfully led the largest format change in world’s testing history exceeding all global standards of testing. Through his initiatives gender and educational background parity was achieved by IIMs.
Director
Noor Patel is responsible for Amazon’s Consumer Electronics, Personal Computing, and Amazon Home Services in India. He joined Amazon in late 2014. Prior to taking on this role, he was General Manager, Marketing with the Foods Business at ITC Limited.
Noor joined Amazon.com after 17 years with ITC Limited. At ITC he managed various assignments across Brand Management, Trade Marketing and Distribution. He has a varied experience spanning a range of consumer products.
Noor holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management from XLRI Jamshedpur, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from College of Engineering, Pune. Noor lives in Bangalore with his wife, daughter, and son.
Advisor
Advisor CII National Healthcare Council Governing Board Member Health Sector Skills Council Governing Board Member Life Sciences Sector Skills Council Consultant Emeritus Max Healthcare Institute Ltd shubnumsingh8@gmail.com
Dr. Shubnum is an alumnus of Lady Hardinge Medical College, Delhi and has Four decades of rich experience in the healthcare sector spanning across roles such as a practicing Clinician, Healthcare Management & Administration, Healthcare Capability Building/ Skilling and Healthcare Policy & Governance. Extremely passionate about advancing the delivery of healthcare services in India to meet the needs and aspirations of its citizenry. Her strength lies in capability building, education ,understanding of physician behavior and nuances of operationalizing healthcare delivery systems in resource constrained environments . Leveraging technology and understanding of digital health is an area of keen interest. Active engagement in community focused intervention has further strengthened her endeavor and contribution towards the cause of accessible healthcare
As a Clinical Allergist her vision is to grow the discipline & build research capabilities.
Professor
Arvind Sahay Ph.D. (University of Texas Austin), P.G.D.M. (IIM Ahmedabad), B.Tech. (IIT Kanpur)
Professor of Marketing and International Business
MN Vora Chair Professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship
Chairperson – India Gold Policy Center @IIMA
Chairperson – Marketing Area @ IIMA
Chairperson – NSE Center for Behavioral Science in Economics, Finance and Marketing
arvin.sahay@gmail.com
Professor Sahay joined IIMA in June 2004 from London Business School where he had been teaching since his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Texas at Austin.
Professor Sahay is currently an independent director on the board of Brandscapes Consultancy Pvt. Ltd, Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers & Chemicals Limited (GNFC), HIL (A CK Birla Group Firm) and Director on the board of IFCI Limited. He has worked with the working group on Gold established by the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India and with the Niti Aayog Committee to Transform Gold Markets. As Dean(AER), he has led the fund raising effort at IIMA and had helped raise more than INR 130 crores over 36 months. His strong international orientation had also resulted in an increase in student exchange numbers from 120 to 180 over three years. As Chairperson (SBU Head) of Executive Education at IIMA He was able to raise the revenues from INR 670 million to INR 920 million over two years (CAGR of 17%). He is also the Chairperson of the India Gold Policy Center at IIMA is also the Chairperson of the the marketing area at IIMA. In December 2019, he was appointed as the first Chairperson of the NSE Center for Behavioral Science at IIMA.
His primary areas of interest include marketing strategy, pricing, neuroscience and consumer behavior, brand management, high tech marketing, international trade and investment. Sectorally, he has worked extensively in pharmaceuticals, cement, building materials, telecom, broadcast, automotive, FMCG, education and financial services sectors among others. At the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, he has taught the basic marketing courses on the PGP, PGPX and PGP-PMP programs. In addition, he offers elective courses on pricing, international trade, brand management, neuroscience and consumer behavior, tracking organizational performance and valuation, Fintech: Business Models, Strategy and Marketing and Doing Business in India. His executive education and consulting clients come primarily from the financial services, pharmaceutical, building materials conglomerates and media sectors. His teaching ratings are consistently in the 9/10 range.
His corporate experience includes stints as a management trainee in the manufacturing sector and as a customer service and then account manager in the financial services industry. He has consulted and done corporate training for more than 50 clients in India and abroad. He has conducted programs for dealers in industries like cement, FMCG, automotive, pharmaceuticals and auto components
Professor Sahay is the recipient of the University Wide Outstanding Dissertation Award from the University of Texas at Austin (for his Ph.D thesis), the Innovation in Teaching Award at London Business School and of the Dewang Mehta Best Teacher Award in Marketing Management and the UTV Bloomberg Best Marketing Professor in India. He was also nominated to the Thinkers50 India list by the Institute of Competitiveness, Harvard Business School.
He has been an invited speaker at the Pricex Conference in Chicago, at the BusinessWeek Conference on E-marketing in London, at the annual meetings of All India Management Association in Indore, at the Western Conference of the Confederation of Indian Industry in Ahmedabad, at the CIO Forum, at the India International Gold Convention, at various corporates in India and abroad to their leadership teams and at the Indian Professional Business Network in Qatar. He is the coordinator and lead faculty for IIMA’s management development programs on Pricing, Tracking Organizational Performance, Neuroscience in Marketing, Fintech, and Innovating for Growth, the first programs of their kind in India. He has been a member of the FICCI Sub-Committee on Pharmaceuticals.
His recent research has been in the areas of brand relationships, tensile pricing, life cycles in marketing, customer dimensions of gold in India, customer responses to dynamic pricing and how and when to implement dynamic pricing, customer reactions to overlapping price ranges; impact of bundling on customer reference prices; customer loss aversion at different price levels; impact of price changes in pharmaceuticals in India on demand, brand advocacy, and brand preference reversal due to cognitive load and discount framing. His latest papers appear in “Judgment and Decision Making in 2017 (there are limits to loss aversion), Journal of Global Marketing” in 2018 (there are limits to quantity changes in FMCG products before customers react ) and in Resources Policy in 2020 (that gold purchase has strong cultural influences – some of which have led to failure of policy measures like the GMS).
Arvind has authored more than 50 cases and published in leading international journals like the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of International Business Studies, Sloan Management Review, Vikalpa, the Journal of Academy of Marketing Science; Journal of Product and Brand Management, Judgment and Decision Making and Journal of Indian Business Research. His paper in the Journal of Academy of Marketing Science is one of the most widely cited papers in marketing. He has been a regular columnist for Outlook Business magazine on marketing strategy and also writes occasionally for the leading Indian business newspapers, Financial Express, and Dainik Bhaskar on gold, economics and business. He is the author of a case book on marketing strategy called Cases in Pricing, Marketing Communications and Distribution.
Arvind has been a visiting faculty at, EADA (Spain), the Mason School of at the College of William and Mary (USA), University of Texas at Austin (USA), IIM Lucknow, Asian Institute of Technology, (Vietnam), Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria (South Africa), SP Jain Institute of Management Research (Singapore, Dubai), Retail Alliance (Dubai) and Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.
Arvind loves to play golf, go for treks in the mountains, and read books on the brain and human behavior. He follows tennis, football and cricket when he can. He is married with two children.
Professor Sahay can be contacted at arvin.sahay@gmail.com.
Scientist
Y.S. Rajan has a proven track record of excellence as a Scientist, Technologist, Administrator, Organisation Builder and Leader, Diplomat, Academic, Writer and Poet. He combines a unique ability for original and innovative thinking with strong implementation skills. He has capability to network with multi–disciplinary and multi–cultural groups.
He has made key contributions to space research, technology and applications since 1964 and continues to be an important expert on space matters. As Scientific Secretary, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), he was responsible for a combination of scientific, technical, administrative, planning, policy and international cooperation matters. His contributions in shaping ISRO from its initial experimental phases into a major service delivery organisation have been remarkable. In the process, he has also been a creator of many institutions and sustainable mechanisms between ISRO and its end-users. He has worked with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA and NASA for about three years.
He is also a well recognized authority and thought leader on technology development, business management and society linkages. While holding various positions of responsibility related to science and technology (S&T) between 1988 and 2002, he has shaped key policies and implemented several successful R&D projects with industry participation. He has been responsible for creating a series of documents related to Technology Vision 2020 for India, which culminated in a book on a roadmap for socio-economic development for India called “India Vision 2020”. He has practical ground level experience in developmental issues and has founded and built organizations like Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), which he has led for about two decades. These organizations have helped to bring relevant technologies to improve productivity for the agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors.
He is also a prolific writer and has written on a variety of subjects, including on science, technology, business, youth, leadership, social and ethical issues. He has authored and co-authored a number of books and has contributed to several others. He has also written a large number of articles in journals in India and International papers/ magazines, etc. He is an excellent communicator in written and spoken form for different segments of people ranging from school children to accomplished elders.
He has written seven books of poetry in an Indian language, Tamil which has been critically acclaimed by eminent Indian poets. He has also written three books of English poems which have received very good reviews.
He was awarded Padma Shri by the President of India during 2012.
During January 2013, he was felicitated at the India Geospatial Forum, with Lifetime Achievement Award.
RBI Chair Professor
Mr Manoj Panda is RBI Chair Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. He was earlier Director of IEG and the Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), Hyderabad. He has served as a member of the National Statistical Commission and held various academic positions at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai and the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Indian Statistical Institute. He has also spent a year at the Yale University, USA on a post-doctoral fellowship. He has undertaken short term assignments for several international organizations including the World Bank, ADB and UNDP.