Board of Governors

Vision, Knowledge, Leadership

Our Board of Governors comprises, outstanding business leaders, entrepreneurs and professionals from the corporate world, government sector, academia and the development sector. Their vision, knowledge and leadership are invaluable in guiding the Institute as we strive towards becoming a globally recognized management school.

Chairman

Mr Pankaj Ramanbhai Patel

Chairman, Zydus Lifesciences

Mr Pankaj Ramanbhai Patel is the Chairman of a leading Indian Pharmaceutical company Zydus Lifesciences Limited (Formerly known as Cadila Healthcare Limited). He is ranked 46th on Forbes magazine’s 2019 list of the richest Indians with an estimated net worth of 2.7 billion USD.

He has made commendable contributions in the field of health care. He has been honoured with multiple awards including the ‘Pharma Man of the Year’ by the Federation of Indian Industry and Economists for contributing to the growth of the Indian Pharma Industry. The World Pharmaceutical Frontiers ranked him in their First Pharma 40 list of ‘world's most influential people in the field of healthcare.’

He also is a member of many prestigious societies including Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, Indian Drug Manufacturers Association, Basic Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals and Cosmetics Export Promotion Council, and Gujarat Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Mr Patel played an active role in fighting against swine flu by securing approval from the Drug Controller General of India to launch VaxiFlu-s, the first Indian H1N1 vaccine and one of only a few such vaccines in the world.

Mr Patel is a graduate of Gujarat University. He holds a Master’s degree in Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology from L.M. College of Pharmacy.

Members

Prof. Ashok Banerjee

Director, IIM Udaipur

Prof. Ashok Banerjee is a Chartered Accountant and holds an M.Com. Degree from Calcutta University and a Ph.D. from Rajasthan University. Prof Banerjee is a seasoned academician with vast experience as a senior professor in the Finance and Control area. His research interests are in the areas of high-frequency finance, Fintech, and sentiment analysis. He was the Dean (New Initiatives and External Relations at IIM Calcutta from 2012 to 2015. Prior to joining IIM Calcutta, he was a professor at IIM Lucknow.
He also serves as an independent director on the Boards of companies in the financial and technology sectors. During his stint as Dean, Prof Banerjee is credited with setting up an incubator at IIM Calcutta, called IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, which is recognized by the Department of Science & Technology as a Technology Business Incubator. Prof. Banerjee was the founder-coordinator of the Financial Research and Trading Laboratory of IIM Calcutta. He was instrumental in starting the International Finance Conference in 2009 at IIM Calcutta. The conference is now rechristened as India Finance Conference and is organized jointly by IIM Calcutta, IIM Bangalore and IIM Ahmedabad.

Prof. Ashish S. Galande

Faculty, Marketing area at IIM Udaipur

Ashish is a faculty in the Marketing area at IIM Udaipur. He has a PhD in Management from Deakin University and also a graduate of the Fellow Programme in Management from the Indian School of Business (ISB). His research and teaching interests include applications of advances in computing algorithms to marketing problems. He is currently focused on understanding how communications (between firms and brands, between firms/brands and consumers, and between consumers) interact with the marketing mix to improve brand equity and profitability. He, with his co-authors, has received prestigious research grants and has presented his research at various international conferences. His research has been published in public policy and marketing journals, and he has work under review at leading publications.
He started his career as a software developer and subsequently, before joining academics, has over a decade of experience in marketing, new business development, and general management across different sectors including hi-tech products, consumer durables, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and mobile and electronic payment services. He has also been a board member at a clean-energy startup while he was working in the US.

Mr D. Shivakumar

Advent International, Operating Partner

Mr D. Shivakumar is currently working as the Group Executive president at Aditya Birla group for Strategy and Business development. He joined the ABG group in January 2018.
Prior to this, he was Chairman and CEO for PepsiCo for four years and before that with Nokia as CEO for India and later Emerging markets for nearly a decade. Mr Shivakumar has been a CEO for half his career and was one of the youngest CEOs in India in 2003. He worked in HUL for several years, mostly in marketing. He has worked with over 50 brands in his career and seen many business transformations.
Mr Shivakumar writes and regularly teaches on Innovation, leadership, Followership, Business Models, Digitization etc. across the leading business schools in the world.
He is a believer in giving back to society. He has been on the Board of Governors of IIM Ahmedabad between 2012 and 2017. He was on the Godrej Consumer products Board between 2009 and 2017. He was the president of the All India management association in 2012-2013. He is currently the Chairman of the mobile marketing association and Vice-chairman of the Advertising standards council of India. He is currently on the board of XLRI.
Mr Shivakumar has been awarded many times in his career – Best CEO, Best brand builder, for leadership, for Turnaround etc. The awards most dear to him are the two distinguished Alumnus awards he got from IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta. He is one of twenty people in India to have distinguished alumnus awards from both IIT and IIM.

Ms Gita Nayyar

Board Member, Senior Advisor and Angel Investor

Ms Gita Nayyar is a senior finance professional with over 30 years of leadership experience in the UK and India with MNC banks and in the Venture Capital Industry. She has extensive cross-functional experience in Corporate banking, Investment banking, Wealth management, Fundraising, and Risk management.
Ms Nayyar is currently engaged as a Senior Advisor to the Fulcrum Ventures Ltd, a venture capital fund which invests primarily in pharmaceuticals, wellness and healthcare. She is also a very active and successful angel investor and is also a mentor to startups. Ms Nayyar is recognized for her expertise in investing and building early-stage companies and is often invited to lecture/share her perspective on the subject.
She also serves as an Independent Director on the board of two companies associated with the Tata group and has previously served on the board of a Wealth management and securities trading company. She is on the Advisory committee of HelpAge India, a large national NGO.
She is passionate about supporting girl child education and is a committed advocate for the cause of Gender diversity and enhancing women’s representation in Corporate India. She strongly believes in the importance of giving back to society and the nation.
Ms Nayyar is an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College USA and holds a B.A. Economics (Hons) degree from Jesus and Mary College, Delhi.

Mr Harsha Bhogle

Sports Commentator and Journalist

Mr Harsha Bhogle is widely acknowledged to be not just the voice, but the face of Indian cricket. He started at a time when few Indian broadcasters were considered good enough to be on overseas networks. But he changed those perceptions, especially in 1999 when a poll on an independent website rated him the number one commentator for the season.
He brings a fresh perspective to cricket and is seen as a voice of reason which makes him acceptable across all cultures. His interesting background, a chemical engineer and an alumnus of IIM-Ahmedabad has made him a role model for many.
He has been the face of ESPN from the day the channel was launched, and that role grew to include Star Sports and Star Cricket which also broadcast signature programmes like “Harsha Unplugged” and “Harsha On-line”.
Mr Bhogle has now commentated on over four hundred one-day internationals, over a hundred test matches and has been closely associated with T20 cricket, right from the first game that India played, through six IPL tournaments, five Champions Leagues and five T20 World Cups.
His columns are widely read, and a selection of those has been put together in a book called “Out of the Box”. His video blogs “Step Out with Harsha” were quite popular and he now has over a million followers on Twitter.
Mr Bhogle is a brand ambassador for Boehringer Ingelheim (Stroke Awareness).

Ms Mythily Ramesh

Co-Founder and CEO, NextWealth

Ms Mythily Ramesh has more than 25 years of experience in her career. She completed her BE Computer Science from College of Engineering, Guindy and MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. In her 20-year successful stint in Wipro, she grew from a Customer Support Executive to a Senior Vice President. Her career spans product management, marketing, business head and quality. As a certified Black Belt, she drove the Six Sigma initiative in Wipro and was successful in moving the organization from 1.7 Sigma to 4.7 Sigma and reducing the order to collection cycle from 365 days to 120 days.
Ms Ramesh was also the CEO of a startup in Wipro called 01markets and built a successful business around e-procurement and was a pioneer in Reverse Auctions in India. She is a certified CPM and CPIM specialist. She then moved to the Corporate office to handle Mergers & Acquisitions, Business Development and Innovation. As part of Innovation, she seeded multiple new service areas which have grown into 100+ million-dollar business for Wipro.
In her last stint in Wipro as Senior VP for Wipro BPO, Ms Ramesh was responsible for pre-sales and solutions, product management, transition, platform BPO, BPO consulting and procurement, and BPO operations. Her target was to build the business revenue - increase the back-office business from 5% to 35 % which she did in two years’ timeframe and also brought in 300 million dollars of business for the division.
In 2006 and 2007, Ms Ramesh was adjudged one of the 25 most Powerful women in India by India Today and Dataquest. She has been profiled many times in Business Today and Business World as a successful woman IT professional.
In 2010 she and a few ex-Wipro colleagues started a social entrepreneurship firm NextWealth focusing on IT/BPO services from small towns in a unique distributed delivery model. Their mission is to create 10,000 jobs in small towns. She is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of NextWealth.
Ms Ramesh is actively involved in the industry and has given many talks on Entrepreneurship in Nasscom, IIT Kanpur Alumni Chapter, IIM Bangalore MDP program, Dayanand Sagar Centre for Entrepreneurship to name a few. She serves on the board of Karnataka Bank, WEP solutions Ltd and WEP Digital as an independent Director and is a Steering committee member of IIMPACT, an NGO started by IIMA Alumni focusing on educating the underprivileged girl children in India.

Shri Purnendu Kishore Banerjee

Joint Secretary (Mgt. & MC & Scholarship)

Mr Nirmal Jain

Chairman of the Board & Founder,IIFL Holdings Limited

An IIM-Ahmedabad graduate, Mr Nirmal Jain is a Chartered Accountant and Cost Accountant by qualification. With a record of being among the toppers at academics, he stood second at the All India Chartered Accountancy exam. Armoured with all these qualifications before the age of 23, he was all set to take on the financial world.
Mr Jain began his career with Hindustan Lever Ltd. (now Hindustan Unilever) in 1989, where he made a significant contribution towards a rapid and profitable growth of the company’s commodity export business. He joined two brokers in 1995 to co-found an equity research unit called Inquire- Indian Equity Research, where he set new standards in equity research.
A year later, in 1995, he established his own financial research company, Probity Research and Services Private Ltd. The company had a good start and created a whopping revenue of approximately One crore INR, which was, however, not enough to please him. He thus decided to tap the potential of the internet and launched www.indiainfoline.com where he shared volumes of research data—their chief source of revenue—with the customers. Calling it a foolish move, several core team members of the company quit, not realising that this very ‘foolish move’ was going to offer a bigger scale ever possible to the company. Thus, India Infoline, and now IIFL was born.
Today, IIFL is recognised as one of the leading independent financial services companies in India with a presence in non-banking finance, wealth management, broking, financial products distribution and investment banking space and it has a leadership position in most businesses it does. Under Mr Jain’s visionary direction, today IIFL has a market capitalization of over Rs 19,000 crores and is backed by marquee global investors like Fairfax Group, private equity major General Atlantic and UK government’s private equity arm - CDC Group. IIFL Group has a customer base of four million across 8 countries. The NBFC operation has over 1,100 branches mostly in smaller towns and rural locations. The wealth business manages and advises over Rs 120,000 crores of assets and has over 10,000 wealthiest families as clients. IIFL Institutional Equities caters to over 300 global funds. IIFL is one of the most trusted BFSI brands in India as per The Economic Times.

Prof. N. Viswanathan

Faculty, Finance and Accounting at IIM Udaipur

Prof. Viswanathan has been a faculty member in the Finance and Accounting area of IIM Udaipur since 2013. He is a Fellow in Management from XLRI and also holds a post-graduate diploma in management from IIM Calcutta and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from NIT Rourkela. Apart from core courses in finance, he teaches an elective course on mergers, acquisitions, and corporate restructuring. His research interests are primarily in corporate finance and in topics at the intersection of finance and operations management.
He joined the Institute with 19 years of experience with leading firms and business groups across businesses like management consulting, cement, real estate, and telecommunications. He also had the opportunity to work with a promoter/holding company. The functional areas he has experience in span financial planning and analysis, strategic investments, investor relations, joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, divestments, and equity and debt financing.

Mr Pranay Chulet

Founder & CEO, Quikr

Mr Pranay Chulet is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Quikr since January 2008.
Mr Chulet grew up in India, but right after his education, he moved to New York to join Mitchell Madison Group, a strategy consulting firm that advised clients in media and finance industries. Two years into the country, he launched a start-up which he later merged with Walker Digital, Priceline’s incubator. The start-up focused on helping small businesses convert online leads into paying customers. His work at Walker Digital earned him a US patent in the area of matchmaking between buyers and sellers.
Subsequently, Mr Chulet helped large US media companies such as movie studios and publishers evaluate and launch new digital businesses as a Principal at Booz & Co. in New York.
Mr Chulet is an avid follower of films. He likes them enough that he learnt film making at the New York Film Academy and made a new-format feature film that also turns into a game. The film encouraged the audience to be a part of the narrative, and the story of the film unfolded based on their actions. The film was made with the bet that someday the internet would dominate video distribution, sending video to intelligent devices, and that will give rise to new entertainment formats that cut across films and games. While making the film in New York, he used Craigslist to audition almost 100 actors, recruit 50+ cast/crew members, hire software developers, and even rent his apartment in New York while he sat in India editing its final cut. That is when he realized that nothing like Craigslist existed in India which led to the birth of Quikr.
Mr Chulet graduated from IIM Calcutta with a Gold Medal in 1996 and earned a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi prior to that.

Mr Rajendra Bhatt

Divisional Commissioner, Udaipur

Shri Rajendra Bhatt (Rajasthan 2007) serves as the Divisional Commissioner, Udaipur. In the past years, he has worked as Commissioner, Devasthan Department, Udaipur. He was also the Collector and District Magistrate of Bhilwara and Dungarpur.
Shri Rajendra Bhatt has held additional charges as Additional Registrar, Cooperative Societies, Udaipur.
He has received an induction training from Administrative Training Institute, West Bengal. He has an MA in Economics.

Mr Rahul Dsouza

Vice President/Executive Director, Goldman Sachs

Mr. Rahul Dsouza worked for 2.5 years as an Aerospace Engineer in Raytheon Technologies, one of the largest Aerospace and Defense Systems Manufacturers in the world. His work revolved mainly in the manufacturing of Evacuation Systems for the Airbus and Boeing Family of aircrafts.
He then moved on to complete his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Udaipur.
After completing MBA, he worked for 7.5 years in Strategy/Management Consulting in Accenture Strategy - India Business advising and helping Organizations solve critical business problems.
Post Consulting, he is working for 1+ years as a Vice President/Executive Director, Global Product Head - Talent Development & India Head - Product Experience at Goldman Sachs, driving transformation projects aimed at developing a user-centric, seamless digital experience to recruit, retain, reward and retire talent.

Mr Suresh Naik Ramavath

Entrepreneur, Educationalist and Master Trainer/ Faculty

Mr Suresh Naik Ramavath is the President of the International School of Trade & Technology Management (ISTTM Business School) Hyderabad. ISTTM Business School is one of the top rank private business schools in Hyderabad, well renowned for its 2 years full-time MBA technology business management and entrepreneurship development programs.
He is also working as the Managing Director of Tribal Mantra India Private Limited which is a retail brand to promote Indian tribal art and craft in Modern trade exclusively. The objective is to create the right value and premium market place for tribal products.
Mr Ramavath is also the National Head of the Tribal Wing of Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry (DICCI). DICCI is an apex body of ST/SC entrepreneurs in the country with 25 State and 7 International chapters, working since 2005.
Mr Ramavath is the recipient of multiple awards and accolades including All India Achievers Award, 2011 and 2013 for Arch of Excellence in Management Education; Award of Excellence for outstanding contribution from “Africa Entrepreneurs & Investors Network”; Award of Excellence for outstanding support for Yemen Petroleum Company from Bawazir E-Society of Technology; Social Service award, 2011 from V Care foundation for service to the orphan children; and Glitz award, 2012 for the largest fundraising cultural activity for HIV+ children of Desire society.

Ms Vidya Shah

Senior Executive Vice President, Edelweiss Financial Services Limited

Ms Vidya Shah is the CEO of EdelGive Foundation, which is the philanthropy arm of the Edelweiss group. Former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for the Edelweiss Group, she is now part of the board for various prominent organisations like Agastya International Foundation, Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, Common Purpose, Women on Wings, Toolbox India Foundation and Masoom in addition to Edelweiss.
In each of these organisations, her role enables her to contribute strategically which helps them build a stronger presence by implementing useful plans in an efficient manner.
Ms Shah attained an MBA degree from IIM, Ahmadabad and spent the first 11 years of her career in the field of investment banking with companies like ICICI, Peregrine and NM Rothschild wherein, her role was to advise the corporate in Capital Raising and M&A transactions. Later, she worked in the capacity of a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for the Edelweiss Group while also heading the Human Resources and Administration functions for the firm.
Apart from being an active member of the CSR and business fraternity, Ms Shah is a connoisseur of art and spearheads Edelweiss’s art event called Palette. Her love for the field of art is not limited to collecting artefacts and paintings, it extends to appreciate music, and the same is visible in the efforts she is putting into learning this skill.
After having gained a diverse experience, Ms Shah set up the EdelGive Foundation and has been its CEO since its inception. Under her leadership, over the last seven years, EdelGive has become a catalyst of change, dedicated to collaborative philanthropy in the fields of education, livelihoods and women empowerment.