Ashish Dhawan is the Founder and CEO of Central Square Foundation where he hopes to bring a fresh impact-based approach to philanthropy in India. Before this, he worked for twenty years in the investment management business and ran one of India’s leading private equity funds, ChrysCapital. Mr Dhawan serves on the board of several non-profits including Akanksha Foundation, 3.2.1 Education Foundation, Teach For India, Centre for Civil Society, Janaagraha and GiveLife. He was recently recognized as the NextGen Leader in Philanthropy by Forbes India. Mr Dhawan received an MBA degree from Harvard Business School and a BS degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Yale University.
Mukesh Ambani is Managing Director and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries, India’s second largest company by market capitalization. After joining Reliance Industries in 1981, he led the company’s backward integration drive from textiles to polyesters and eventually into petrochemicals and petroleum refining. He is also Chairman of Infotel Broadband Services Private and Chairman of the Board of Governors at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Mr Ambani holds a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Mumbai and an MBA from Stanford University.
Nandan M. Nilekani co-founded Infosys, was its CEO during 2002-07, Board co-Chairman during 2007-09, and returned to Infosys in August 2017 as its Non-Executive Chairman. As the first Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India during 2009-2014, Nilekani successfully created and implemented Aadhar, the world’s largest biometric identification system. He is the Co-founder and Chairman of EkStep, a nonprofit initiative that is creating a learner-centric, technology-based platform to improve basic literacy and numeracy for millions of children. Nilekani is the recipient of a number of national and international awards. Fortune Magazine conferred on him “Asia’s Businessman of the year 2003” award. He received the prestigious Joseph A Schumpeter Prize in 2005 for Innovative Services in Economy, Economic Sciences and Politics. In 2006, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the President of India. He was also named the 2006 Businessman of the Year by Forbes Asia. Time magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006 and 2009. Foreign Policy listed Nilekani as one of the Top 100 Global thinkers in 2010. He won The Economist magazine’s Social & Economic Innovation Award 2014 for his leadership of Aadhaar. In 2017, CNBC-TV 18 conferred on him their India Business Leader award for outstanding contributions to the Indian economy, and he received the 22nd Nikkei Asia Prize for Economic & Business Innovation. Nilekani is the author of “Imagining India” and the co- author with Viral Shah of his second book, “Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations”
Dr Mausumi Das is currently a faculty member at the Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, DSE. She has previously taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, and also held a visiting faculty position at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Delhi Centre. Her area of specialisation is economic growth and development. She has published research articles in various reputed international journals, such as Journal of Economic Growth and Journal of Development Economics. She received her Ph.D. from the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2013 and September 2016. Prior to that, he was the Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2006, the youngest person ever to hold the position. His research is broadly on the role of institutions, especially financial institutions, in fostering economic development. He is an electrical engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. He earned his M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and his Ph.D. from MIT.
