Our speakers

Rajeev Thakkar, CIO, PPFAS AMC

Rajeev Thakkar, Chief Investment Officer & Director, PPFAS Mutual Fund

Rajendra Singh Pawar, Chairman & Co-Founder, NIIT Group

Padma Bhushan awardee, Rajendra Singh Pawar is the Chairman & Co-Founder of NIIT Group and the Founder of NIIT University. He graduated with a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi. 

He co-founded NIIT in 1981 with a vision of bringing people and computers together successfully. Over the last 40 years, NIIT has trained about 40 million learners in over 40 countries.

Mr Pawar serves on the Boards of the India School of Business (ISB) and The Scindia School. He also chaired the Board of Directors of the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) and was Vice Chairman of the NCAER Governing Body. Additionally, he has served on various other Boards including IIT Delhi and IIM Bangalore.  

He chaired the NASSCOM Cyber Security Task Force (2016-2017), aligning with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision to make India a global cyber security hub. He was a member of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s National Council on Skills Development (2009-2014) and served on Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s National Taskforce (1998) to develop India into an IT superpower.

Some of his recognitions include ‘Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Delhi’ (1995); 'IT Man of the Year' by Dataquest (1998), 'Master Entrepreneur of the Year' by Ernst & Young (1999), Lifetime Achievement ICT Award (2019) by Dataquest, and Lifetime Achievement Award for Education (2022) by FICCI.
 

Rajesh Bansal, CEO, The Reserve Bank Innovation Hub

Rajesh Jejurikar, Executive Director & CEO (Auto and Farm Sector), Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd

Rajesh Kumar, Inspector General of Forest, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change

Shri. Rajesh S. is a member of the 2000 batch of the prestigious Indian Forest Service (IFS) in the AGMU Cadre.  As a career civil servant, he has a 24-year rich experience in public policy, administration and programme implementation in the development space. 

Currently, he is serving as an Inspector General of Forests in the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of India.  In this position, he is responsible for the subject matters related to Forest Protection, Forest Fire Management, Disaster Management, Externally Aided Projects and Forest Establishment.

Before this, he worked in the Government of India as a Director in the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), New Delhi, as a Director in the COVID-19 Management Core Team in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, as an Assistant. Inspector General of Forests (Project Tiger), and as the Regional Deputy Director (Northern Region), Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, New Delhi under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.

He has held different senior-level posts in the Government of Arunachal Pradesh, in the Government of NCT of Delhi, in the Government of Kerala and the Andaman and Nicobar Administration.

As part of his academic training, he holds a professional degree in forestry and specializations in Environmental Science, Economics, Climate Change and International Development from premier universities in India and abroad.  He spent his sabbaticals under the Erasmus Mundus, Chevening, JICA and DAAD frameworks and published more than 30 papers on various development topics.

His interests are in climate change mitigation and adaptation, urban forest governance, sustainable forest management models, community-based natural resource development models, public health, health research and policy, etc. 

Rajesh Kumar Srivastava, Chairman & Managing Director, Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC)

Rajesh Magow, Co-founder & Group CEO, MakeMyTrip

Rajesh is the Co-Founder & Group Chief Executive Officer of MakeMyTrip Limited, India’s leading online travel company. He also serves as the Vice-Chairman for IAMAI, and Chairperson of ASSOCHAM’s National Council on Travel & Tourism. A believer in India’s digital opportunity and a backer of many young Indian tech companies, Rajesh is passionate about transforming businesses and leveraging technology to create disproportionate value for customers.

Over the years, Rajesh has played a crucial role in multiple landmark events of MakeMyTrip, including its listing on NASDAQ in 2010, the merger of MakeMyTrip and Ibibo group, and most recently, played a pivotal role in ensuring MakeMyTrip showed resilience and bounced back stronger post the pandemic.

Rajesh has received multiple industry awards, including The Economic Times Human Capital Awards as the People-Focused CEO of the Year, Bloomberg Best CFO Award and ET Retail eDNA E-commerce Leader of the Year. Rajesh has served as Director on the board of Flipkart.

Rajesh Sehgal, CFA, Managing Partner, Equanimity Investments

Rajesh is a long-term investor with tremendous breadth and   depth   of   experience   managing   early   stage investments, private equity and public equity funds for over 2 decades. He has on-the-ground experience across emerging market countries, analysing various industries and businesses spanning different stages of their lifecycle. Rajesh has the distinction of being the Founding Chair of the India chapter of CRUF, a global body set up in 2005 by users of financial reports for users of financial reports to be an open forum for learning about and responding to the many accounting and regulatory changes that affect corporate reporting. He is a Board Member of the Mumbai chapter of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneur), a global non-profit community that works to help entrepreneurs in all ways. At TiE, Rajesh is co-Chair of the FinTech focused special interest group that spearheads TiE Mumbai’s focussed effort to help the FinTech community. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Apar Industries Limited.

Rajesh started his career as Deputy Manager -Corporate Finance at SBI Capital Markets Limited in 1996 and swiftly moved into the Treasury & Investments Group where he was involved with investing in equity and fixed income securities. In 1999, he was hired by Dr. Mark Mobius to join the Emerging Markets Group (EMG) at Franklin Templeton in their Mumbai office. He spent the next 17 years working with Dr. Mobius, helping the EMG invest in equity markets across Asia, Africa, East Europe and Latin America.

Rajesh managed investments in equities and equity related instruments of companies, large and small, listed and unlisted, across emerging market countries through public and private equity funds. His investment experience ranges all across the deal spectrum from deal sourcing, screening, financial modelling, evaluation, diligence, closing,  post-investment  monitoring  including  board  representations,  providing  value-add  to  the  investee company, working on exit and ensuring exits from such investments. He has also been instrumental in fund raising for all Franklin Templeton Private Equity funds and completely involved in related LP (Limited Partner) interactions globally.

Rajesh has been active in the Indian startupecosystem since 2007 when he made his first startup investment. Since then he has been a prolific angel investors having invested in over 20 startups, worked closely with the management teams in most cases and successfully secured exits in a handful of these startup investments.

Rajesh is a Wharton alumnus in addition to being an XLRI management graduate specialising in finance and marketing. He is a CFA charter holder and has earned a post-graduate diploma in Securities Law from Mumbai University.

Rajesh Uppal, MEB(HR, IT, SAFETY, DE), Maruti Suzuki India

Mr. Rajesh Uppal is a visionary and a thought leader with an impressive career of more than 38 years. Mr. Uppal is currently serving as the Chief Information Officer of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., and as a Member Executive Board (MEB) he looks after HR, IT, Digital Enterprise, Education & Training and Safety at Maruti Suzuki.

Mr. Uppal’s association with Maruti Suzuki began in 1985 when he joined the IT team. He has successfully established IT as a critical business function in initial years of Maruti Suzuki. Realizing the importance of trained and motivated human resource, Mr. Uppal had conceived and successfully established a dedicated Training Academy in Maruti Suzuki which has garnered prestigious awards and accolades. Under his leadership the Company also started Digital Enterprise with only 5 people which today is a full-fledged function accelerating MSIL’s digital transformation journey.