by Rakesh Mohan
LAVEESH BHANDARI is an Indian economist, author, columnist and entrepreneur. He was the founder director of the research firm, Indicus Analytics, which worked on a host of issues pertaining to Indian economic geography and the performance of states and districts in India. He has worked at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), and taught economics at IIT Delhi and other institutions. He is a member of the committee overseeing academic research at the Reserve Bank of India and has been a part of the editorial board at Business Standard. Bhandari is also involved in ventures dealing with the Internet and new media technologies. Currently, he heads Indicus Foundation that works on financial inclusion and environment policy in India.
MARTIN WOLF is associate editor and chief economics Commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was a member of the UK government’s Independent Commission on Banking in 2010–11. Wolf’s interest in India goes back to the 1970s when he was senior economist in the World Bank’s India Division, which led to the publication of an influential book, India’s Exports (1982). Martin has been named in the top 100 lists of global thinkers by Prospect and by Foreign Policy magazines. He has received prestigious prizes for his journalism in many countries, as well as honorary doctorates from the London School of Economics and Warwick University (among others), and honorary fellowships from Nuffield College, Oxford, and King’s College, London (also among others). His most recent publications are Why Globalization Works (2004), Fixing Global Finance (2008) and The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis (2016). He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 for services to financial journalism.
MONTEK SINGH AHLUWALIA is an Indian economist and civil servant who was the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of India from 2004–14. He was previously the first director of the Independent Evaluation Office at the International Monetary Fund from 2001–04. Ahluwalia has been a key figure in the Indian economic reforms process on a continuous basis from the mid-1980s: as special secretary to Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and V.P. Singh; as commerce secretary from 1990–91; as secretary, Economic Affairs, and finance secretary, in the Ministry of Finance 1991–98; as member of the Planning Commission, and member of the Economic Advisory Council to the prime minister from 1998 –2001. He has published a number of articles on various aspects of the Indian economy in academic journals. He has also written on various aspects of India’s economic reforms and on the inclusiveness of India’s growth process. In recognition of his service to the country, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award.
MUKESH AMBANI is the chairman, managing director and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a Fortune Global 500 company and India’s second-most valuable company by market value. RIL deals mainly in refining, petrochemicals, and in the oil and gas sectors. An extreme innovator and believer in game-changing businesses of the future, he is known for challenging conventional wisdom and spotting opportunities quickly. The growth and diversification of the businesses that Ambani has nurtured exemplify the opportunities that twenty-five years of economic reforms have produced. In 2010, he directed and created the world’s largest grass-roots petroleum refinery at Jamnagar, India; his Reliance Retail Ltd is the largest retailer in India; in February 2016, Reliance Jio launched its own 4G smartphone brand name and has shaken up the Indian telecom market. He has served on the board of directors of Bank of America and the international advisory board of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the chairman of the board of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is the only Indian businessman on Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful people.
N.K. SINGH has been an influential practitioner and advocate of economic reforms from the early 1990s in a host of different roles. Most recently he was chairman of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Review Committee for the Ministry of Finance. As a member of the Rajya Sabha until recently, he served on various parliamentary committees, including the Standing Committee on External Affairs, the Public Accounts Committee and the Consultative Committee on Finance. Earlier, as a civil servant, he was expenditure and revenue secretary, secretary to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and member of the Planning Commission. He was the principal interlocutor with multilateral institutions during India’s balance-of-payment crisis in 1991. Currently, he is a member of the governing boards of Nalanda University and ICRIER, among others. He is also a member of the global advisory board of the Tokai Tokyo Financial Holdings, and of the International High Speed Association, Japan. He has authored three books: Politics of Change, Not by Reason Alone, and The New Bihar: Rekindling Governance and Development. He is a reputed columnist in leading Indian dailies. Singh is presently a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
N.R. NARAYANA MURTHY is an Indian IT industrialist and the founder of Infosys, a multinational corporation providing business consulting and software services. Murthy founded Infosys along with six younger colleagues in 1981 and served as the CEO of Infosys for twenty-one years from 1981 to 2002. He articulated, designed and implemented the Global Delivery Model for IT services outsourcing from India. Murthy has been listed among the twelve greatest entrepreneurs of our time by Fortune magazine. He has been described as ‘the father’ of the Indian information technology sector by Time magazine. Murthy has served as an independent director on the corporate boards of a number of leading multinationals like HSBC, DBS Bank and Unilever. He serves on the boards of Ford Foundation, UN Foundation and the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, USA. He has also served on the boards of several educational institutions, including Cornell University, Wharton of Business, INSEAD and the Rhodes Trust. In recognition of his services, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award; the Government of Great Britain awarded him a CBE; and the Government of France with the Legion d’honneur.
NACHIKET MOR is the India country director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He was a banker with ICICI for the first part of his career, and for the second part, has focused his attention on the healthcare sector with a particular interest in the delivery of primary care and the design of national- and state-level health systems. Over the years, he has been associated with reforms in both these sectors. For example, during his term as a member of the central board of the Reserve Bank of India, among other things, he headed the influential ‘Committee on Comprehensive Financial Services for Small Businesses and Low Income Households’, the recommendations of which led to the introduction of the concepts of Payment Banks and Wholesale Finance Banks. As a member of the primary care task force of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, he participated in the design of the concept of ‘Health & Wellness Centres’ for the delivery of primary care, which was based, in part, on his field-level work in that area.
NAUSHAD FORBES is the co-chairman of Forbes Marshall, India’s leading steam engineering and control instrumentation firm. He chairs the steam engineering companies within the group. He was an occasional lecturer and consulting professor at Stanford University from 1987–2004 where he developed courses on technology in newly industrializing countries. He received his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees from Stanford University. He is on the board of several educational institutions and public companies. He is an active member of CII and was its president from 2016–17. He is the chairman of the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Economic Research in Pune. He has, at various times, chaired the national committees on higher education, innovation, technology and international business.
OMKAR GOSWAMI founded CERG Advisory Private Limited and has been its chairman since April 2004. He was the editor of the Business India magazine from 1997 to 1998, and later the chief economist of the Confederation of Indian Industry. Earlier, he taught economics at Oxford University, Delhi School of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi. During
the 1990s, through various government and internationally sponsored research projects, he was influential in affecting thinking on textile policy, industrial restructuring, bankruptcy resolution and corporate governance. A professional economist, Goswami has authored three books and over seventy published papers and monographs. His expertise on corporate governance has been recognized with membership in the boards of some of the largest Indian corporations.
R. GOPALAKRISHNAN has been a corporate leader for fifty years. He served with Tata for eighteen years as a director of Tata Sons and as a board director of several Tata companies. Earlier, he was with Unilever for thirty-one years wherein he served in Jeddah as chairman of Unilever Arabia, in Bengaluru as managing director of Brooke Bond Lipton and vice chairman of Hindustan Lever. He now spends his time writing, advising, speaking and teaching under the brand name MINDWORKS. He has been a columnist for financial newspapers. Gopalakrishnan has authored five bestselling books, including The Case of the Bonsai Manager (2007), What the CEO Really Wants from You (2012) and Six Lenses (2016). He has also written a family chronicle, A Comma in a Sentence: Extraordinary Change in an Ordinary Family over Six Generations (2013). Gopalakrishnan now serves as Distinguished Professor of IIT Kharagpur and as Executive-in-Residence at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.
RAKESH MOHAN has been among India’s most active economic policymakers and an expert on central banking, monetary policy, infrastructure and urban affairs. Most recently, he was executive director at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., representing India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and chairman, National Transport Development Policy Committee, Government of India, with the rank of Minister of State. He is also a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India and secretary, Economic Affairs, in the Ministry of Finance. Mohan has been associated with the Indian economic reforms process on a continuous basis from the late 1980s, covering subjects as diverse as industrial policy, infrastructure, competition policy, regulation, fiscal policy, railways, and monetary policy and financial development. He is the author of two books on monetary policy and central banking, three on urban economics, and two edited volumes on the Indian economy. Mohan is currently Distinguished Fellow, Brookings India, and Senior Fellow, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University.
RAMA BIJAPURKAR is an independent management consultant and recognized thought leader on India’s consumer economy. Her consulting practice is focused on helping domestic and global companies to design relevant business-market strategy for India. Her extensive research on the ‘people’s view’ of India’s fabled domestic consumption opportunity and why Western multinationals struggle with their India strategy has been published in her two books, We Are Like that Only—Understanding the Logic of Consumer India (2009) and its sequel, A Never-before World—Tracking the Evolution of Consumer India (2014). She has served as an independent director on the boards of several of India’s blue-chip companies and on the governing councils or advisory boards of select public policy and academic institutions. In addition, she has been teaching at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, as visiting faculty.
SANDHYA VENKATESWARAN is a deputy director with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In her role as the policy lead for the India office, she focuses on sharpening and advancing the foundation’s policy work in India. She has worked in the development space for over three decades, of which a little over the last decade has centred on policy issues. She has set up and led the organizational policy initiatives at Care India and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, associated with the social policy work at UNICEF and been a part of large civil society campaigns on governance. Much of her work has focused on gender and equity issues. Venkateswaran she is the author of Environment, Development and the Gender Gap (1995).
SANJAYA BARU is currently Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He has previously served as associate editor at the Economic Times and the Times of India, and then as chief editor at the Financial Express and Business Standard. He served as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s media advisor, speech-writer and official spokesperson during the period 2004–08. He was a member of the National Security Advisory Board of India from 1999–2001.He has also served as professor at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore. He was director for geo-economics and strategy at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London) from 2011 to 2016. His publications include Strategic Consequences of India’s Economic Performance (2006); 1991: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Made History (2016), The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (2014).
SARWAR LATEEF began his working life in 1966 as an economics writer on the editorial staff of the Hindustan Times group and the Statesman. Following a fellowship at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs (1974–75), he joined the World Bank in 1976 where he pursued a career that spanned both operational and managerial assignments, working in the bank’s departments for South Asia, West and East Africa, external affairs, international economics, and in the poverty reduction and economic management vice presidency. In 2000, he became the senior adviser on governance in the Bank’s Indonesia Country Office. Since his retirement in late 2002, Lateef has pursued consultancy assignments principally with the World Bank, and also with the African Development Bank, Ausaid and the OECD, advising on governance and anti-corruption development assistance strategies. He recently contributed a background paper to the World Bank’s 2017 World Development Report on ‘Governance and the Law’ about the evolution of the World Bank’s thinking on issues of governance. He is currently researching the role of institutions in India’s development transformation.
SHIVSHANKAR MENON served as national security adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from January 2010 to May 2014; and was earlier India’s foreign secretary. His distinguished career in public service spans diplomacy, national security, atomic energy, disarmament policy, and India’s relations with its neighbours and major global powers. His diplomatic career was capped by coveted postings as ambassador to China and as high commissioner to Pakistan. A major milestone of his career was the Indo-US nuclear deal for which he worked hard to convince the NSG nations to get a clean waiver for nuclear supplies to India. Menon is currently a Distinguished Fellow in the foreign policy programme at Brookings.
SHWETA SAINI is an agricultural trade and policy researcher, and works as a senior consultant with ICRIER. With more than eleven years of experience in industry chamber, academics and business, she has been widely writing in the renowned economic dailies of the country. She has authored and co-authored several research studies on Indian agriculture, such as on agricultural international trade, agricultural policy, and food security. Her research has been published in various international and national books, and as working papers and reports.
SHYAM SARAN is a former foreign secretary and has served as the prime minister’s special envoy for nuclear affairs and climate change and as chairman of the National Security Advisory Board. Most recently, he was chairman of the Research and Information System for Developing Countries. He is a trustee of the World Wildlife Fund (India), and life trustee of the India International Centre. He writes and speaks regularly on foreign policy, climate change, energy security, and national and international security-related issues. In recognition of his service to the country, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian award, in 2011.
STROBE TALBOTT assumed the presidency of the Brookings Institution in July 2002 after a career in journalism, government and academe. His immediate previous post was as founding director of the Yale University Center for the Study of Globalization. Before that, he served in the State Department from 1993 to 2001, first as ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of state for the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, then as deputy secretary of state for seven years. He was closely asso
ciated with the negotiations related to India’s nuclear policy, which is documented in his book Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb (Brookings, 2004).From June 1998 to September 2000, in what was the most extensive dialogue ever between the United States and India, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Indian Minister of External Affairs Jaswant Singh met fourteen times in seven countries on three continents.
SUNIL BHARTI MITTAL is the founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises, one of India’s leading conglomerates with diversified interests. Bharti Airtel, the group’s flagship, is the leading telecom company in India. The group has interests in insurance, real estate, agri and food, besides other ventures with several global leaders such as Singtel, SoftBank, AXA and Del Monte. Mittal serves on a number of international bodies and think tanks: he is chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and chairman of GSM Association (GSMA); the telecom board of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and International Advisory Panel of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). He is member of the global board of advisers at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a trustee at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and a member of the board of Qatar Foundation Endowment (QFE). He was the president of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in 2007–2008. Mittal is a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour awarded to individuals for demonstrating distinguished services of high order.