Forbes India Leadership Awards 2019

Celebrating achievers and their remarkable journeys against all odds

- Salil Panchal

Leading From The Front

The Forbes India Leadership Awards recognise the vision and strategies of business leaders who excelled in a challenging corporate environment

By SALIL PANCHAL

The Forbes India Leadership Awards (FILA), now in its ninth year, are an acknowledgment of corporate excellence, visionary leadership, and innovation. Our distinguished jury navigated the corporate landscape to identify companies and business leaders worthy of the honour.

The year gone by could not have been worse for corporate India. The country is in the midst of a slowdown with the pace of growth slowest in over six years. A deeper crisis looms large. The government is yet to admit this, but Krishnamurthy Subramanian, chief economic advisor to the government, has spoken about “signs of a slowdown”. In such a scenario, achieving corporate excellence, turning around business fortunes, or scaling up startups is rare.

Besides the quantitative data, which includes operating performance, efficiency measures and evaluation with peers, Forbes India looked at qualitative factors to map leadership skills, quality of corporate governance, and effective management.

This year, we included a Special Jury category to recognize the efforts of Bhaskar Bhat, whose transformation of Titan and role in the Tata Group cannot be ignored. Havell India’s Anil Rai Gupta wins the Entrepreneur for the Year award for maintaining critical growth rates (revenue grew by a CAGR of 18 percent in five years to ₹10,058 crore) in a tough business cycle while readying for organic growth. Shiv Nadar, like Azim Premji in 2018, wins the Lifetime Achievement Award, for not just revolutionizing India’s technology landscape but also building HCL Technologies into a global enterprise across 44 countries. Nadar’s contributions towards his philanthropic foundation are also noteworthy.