Manish Sabharwal is Vice-Chairman of TeamLease Services, one of India’s leading staffing and human capital firm. Prior to co-founding TeamLease Services, he co-founded India Life, an HR outsourcing company in 1996 that was acquired in 2002 by a listed US company called Hewitt Associates. Consequently, he was CEO of Hewitt Outsourcing (Asia) based in Singapore for two years. Mr Sabharwal is a member of the National Skill Mission, Central Advisory Board of Education and has served on various policy committees for education, employment and employability. He served as an Independent Director on the Board of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and is a Member of Advisory Board of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). He is also Managing Trustee of the New India Foundation and is a columnist for Indian Express. He got his MBA from The Wharton School and is an alumnus of Shriram College, Delhi and Mayo College, Ajmer.
Deepak S Parekh is the Chairman of Housing Development Finance Corporation, India’s leading housing finance company in India, which he joined in 1978. He is also the non-executive Chairman of GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals Ltd and director of several public companies such as Siemens, Exide Industries, Castrol India, and Infrastructure Development Finance Company. He has also been associated with various government committees including the Committee on Reforms in the Insurance Sector, Committee on Banking Sector Reforms, Investment Commission Committee and the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Infrastructure. Mr. Parekh received a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the Bombay University and holds a Chartered Accountant degree from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales.
Ashish Dhawan is the Founder and CEO of Central Square Foundation where he aims 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 Limited 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 Aadhaar, 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”.
