Jury members

Chetna Sinha

Founder-Chairperson Mann Deshi Bank and Mann Deshi Foundation

Chetna Gala Sinha is an activist , farmer and banker. She is the recipient of the coveted Nari Shaki Purasakar , India's highest Civilian award for women who work in the area of Women’ empowerment.
She has served as a Co-Chair of World Economic Forum in Davos (2018), Switzerland and as a co-chair of Financial Inclusion at the W20 summit (2018) in Argentina. She has been instrumental in driving significant policy changes and the Reserve Bank of India, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, and several other national planning and regulatory institutions regularly seek her advice on financial inclusion.
Among the many accolades that Chetna has won, she was ranked by Fortune India as one of the country’s 50 top business women in 2018.

Harish Bijoor

Brand and Business-strategy Expert and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc

Harish Bijoor is a brand-thinker and practitioner operating out of Bengaluru, India. He runs a unique boutique-consulting outfit branded “Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.”, a brand name that has a consulting presence across the markets of Hong Kong, Seattle, London, Istanbul, Dubai and the Indian sub-continent. Harish has spent his career across the aggressive realms of FMCG, telecom, and consumer durables. He is considered a marketing practitioner and thinker who is ahead of the consumer thinking curve, year on year.
Harish is a public speaker who speaks to corporate audiences across the globe in the realm of motivation, people-management issues, brands, marketing and business at large. He has spoken to corporate audiences across the world for 15, 812 hours to date. Harish teaches at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and Mohali, in addition to semesters at overseas Business schools in the US and Europe. He has been teaching at the Indian School of Business for the past 20 years.
Harish Bijoor contributes regularly to business publications on branding, sales, distribution, and related topics.

Kiran Karnik

Chairman - Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi and Former President, NASSCOM.

Kiran Karnik was President of NASSCOM, the premiere trade body and the “chamber of commerce” for the IT software and services industry in India, till January 2008. Before joining NASSCOM in 2001, Kiran was the Managing Director and CEO of Discovery Networks in India where he spearheaded the launch of Discovery Channel in South Asia in August 1995 and Animal Planet (a Discovery – BBC joint venture) in 1999. From 1991 to 1995, Kiran was Founder-Director of the Consortium for Educational Communication, which was responsible for UGC’s Countrywide Classroom broadcasts and other ICT initiatives.
Earlier, Kiran worked for over 20 years at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), where he held various positions including that of Founder-Director of ISRO’s Development and Educational Communicational Unit. His work in ISRO involved conceptualizing and managing applications of space technology. He was a key player in the pioneering India-USA Satellite Instructional TV Experiment (SITE) and the Kheda Communication Project, which won wide international acclaim.
Kiran served as Special Assistant to the Secretary-General of UNISPACE 82 in the United Nations. He has done consulting assignments for WHO, The World Bank, UN Institute for Disarmament Research, Ford Foundation, and an extended one for UNESCO in Afghanistan. He has been a member of many key government committees, and is presently a member of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, the National Foundation of India, Chairman of Vigyan Prasar and President of India Habitat Centre.
In a career of almost four decades, Kiran has conferred many awards and accolades. He has been awarded the Padma Shri in 2007 and the ‘DATAQUEST IT Person of the Year – 2005’. Business Week named Kiran as one of the ‘Stars of Asia’ in 2004 and he was selected as Forbes magazine’s ‘Face of the Year 2003’, for being a driving force behind India’s offshoring wave.
A post-graduate from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Kiran holds an Honors degree in Physics from Bombay University.

Krishnakumar Natarajan

Co-Founder -Mela Ventures and Earlier Co-Founder at Mindtree

A leading authority in the global IT sector, Krishnakumar Natarajan co-founded Mindtree in 1999 and has played key roles in building the company’s innovative approach to delivering IT services and solutions to global 2000 enterprises. In his role as executive chairman, he focused on leadership development and ensuring a high quality of governance. He also actively mentored different business groups within the company and worked closely with the start-up ecosystem to bring in innovative models of business transformation for clients.
He mentors actively high-growth start-up CEOs helping them with approaches to the market, making the right technology choices, organisation/ people, and fundraising. He has helped investee companies raise subsequent rounds from marquee investors like Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and Mahindra Capital Partners. He has extensive contacts with many of the well-known venture capital firms and this will help bring in high-quality investors in subsequent rounds. His connections with corporate M&A heads are strong and this has helped exits in the past for his investments.
He co-founded Mindtree and in 2007 took the company public. In his role as CEO and Managing Director (April 2008-March 2016), Krishnakumar was responsible for making Mindtree a global IT player. Krishnakumar’s efforts as a business leader has been recognised worldwide, winning him several laurels. Business world and Forbes ranked him amongst the most valuable CEOs in India in 2016. He won Bloomberg UTV’s award as the CEO of the Year in 2010, Business Today CEO of the year award in 2014, and was recognised by the Chief Executive Magazine as one of the twelve global leaders of tomorrow.
In 2013, Krishnakumar served as Chairman of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), where he worked to strengthen the Indian IT industry to build a globally competitive ecosystem. He now serves as the Chairman of Nasscom Foundation. He is an Independent Director in Reserve Bank Information Technology Limited (ReBIT) and on Kotak Asset Management Limited.

Dr. Parthasarathi Shome

Chairman, International Tax Research and Analysis Foundation (ITRAF)

Parthasarathi Shome is presently Chairman, International Tax Research and Analysis Foundation (ITRAF), Bangalore, India, www.parthoshome.com, Senior Visiting Fellow, International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Member, Academic Board of Advanced Diploma in International Taxation (ADIT), London.
He served in the Government of India as Minister of State and Secretary during 2004-15, as Chairman, Tax Administration Reform Commission (TARC), Adviser to the Indian Finance Minister, Chairman, Expert Committee on GAAR (international tax avoidance), and others.
Between 2008-11, he was Chief Economist, HMRC, UK. Between 2011-13 and 1995-97, he served as Director of two of India’s primary economic research institutions, International Council for International Economic Relations (ICRIER) and National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP).
He received Brazil’s highest civilian honour, Commander of the Order of the Southern Cross, for contributions to Brazilian tax reform, in 2000. He served at the IMF during 1983-2004 in various capacities including Chief of Tax Policy, the first Senior Economist in the Office of the Managing Director, and a diplomatic assignment as Director, IMF Singapore Institute. He has provided technical assistance in the fiscal field to 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America and drafted related policy reports.
He rose to a tenured Professorship at The American University, Washington D.C. (1975-83). His Ph.D. thesis on the incidence of the corporate income tax from Southern Methodist University, Dallas (1975), received the Jeanne S. Mattersdorf Award of the National Tax Association of America as “an outstanding student in the field of taxation and public finance”.
He is widely published in peer reviewed journals including IMF Staff Papers, Journal of Public Economics, National Tax Journal (US), Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Public Finance, and several others. He has written and edited books from Cambridge University Press, Lexis Nexis, Oakbridge, Orient Blackswan, Oxford University Press, Springer, Wolters Kluwer, and others. He continues to be a popularly invited speaker in conferences and seminars across the globe. He has published a professional memoire and a coffee table volume on Naïve Art in which he became interested during his global travels to eighty countries.

Dr. Sameer Sharma

Director General and CEO of the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs (IICA)

Dr. Sameer Sharma is a scholar-administrator who belongs to the 1985 batch of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and has a vast experience in public and corporate affairs. He has over 37 years of experience in public and private governance, which includes more than 17 years in the urban sector, where he has held nearly all positions in the urban sector under the State and Central Governments.
He has worked as a Consultant for the UNHabitat in Cambodia and International Federation of Red Cross Societies (IFRCS) and has delivered lectures at the Global Mayor’s Forum organised by Columbia University, NY. He has delivered a talk on his Book at the Bhopal Literature Festival (2021) and the Valley of Words. He has taught statistics and urban spatial structures to graduate students in the United States as well as delivered sessions to build the capacity of civil servants at the national and state academies.
Dr. Sharma has won several awards and appreciations, including the Award for the Best State in promotion of Community Organizations in Slums (2014) given by the President of India; Certificates of Appreciations by the Prime Minister of India for JnNURM reforms in governance in Hyderabad as well as making outstanding efforts enable Hyderabad attain a slum-free status. He was also awarded the V. Ramachandran Award for Excellence in the implementation of urban decentralisation in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC). A full list of awards are listed chronologically in the Accomplishments section below.
Presently, he is the Director General and CEO of the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs (IICA), a think tank under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA). IICA has been turned around – from a loss-making organisation in 2018 to a profit making entity in 2021. Today, IICA is fully self-sufficient.