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Advisory Board
A K Shiv Kumar
National Advisory Council, India
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A K Shiva Kumar is a development economist and professor. In addition to serving as an advisor to UNICEF - India, he is a member of India's National Advisory Council. The council was set up in June 2004 to oversee the implementation of India’s National Common Minimum Programme.
Kumar earned his postgraduate diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and his M.A. in economics from Bangalore University. He also holds a master's degree in public administration and a PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University. Kumar teaches economics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has focussed his research on poverty and human development, social sector analysis, and the impact of development policies on children and women.
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| Kumar has been a regular contributor to UNDP's Annual Human Development Reports. He has also been associated with the preparation of national human development reports in a number of countries including Bhutan, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar and Serbia. |
Gurcharan Das
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Gurcharan Das graduated with honours from Harvard University in Philosophy and Sanskrit. He later attended Harvard Business School. He was the CEO of Procter & Gamble India and later Managing Director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide (Strategic Planning). In 1995, he took early retirement to become a full time writer. He is currently on the boards of a number of companies and is a regular speaker to the top managements of the world’s largest corporations. Das is the author of
The Difficulty of Being Good: On the subtle art of dharma, this interrogates the epic, Mahabharata, in order to answer the question, ‘why be good?’ His international bestseller, India Unbound, is a narrative account of India from Independence to the global information age, and has been published in 17 languages and filmed by BBC. He writes a regular column on for the Times of India, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek.
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S Sivakumar
CEO, ITC Agri Business Division
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S Sivakumar is the Chief Executive of the Agri Businesses Division of ITC Limited, India. This US$ 900 million division is engaged in sourcing a variety of agricultural products, commodity exports, rural marketing and specialty retailing. He has conceptualised the path-breaking e-Choupal model and is spearheading its roll out across the country. With a vision to cover 100,000 villages by 2012, ITC e-Choupal aims to increase incomes and improve the quality of life in rural India while delivering sustainable shareholder value. ITC e-Choupal has won several awards including UNDP’s World Business Award, Wharton-Infosys Business Transformation Award, Development Gateway Award, Stockholm Challenge Award and India Innovation Award. Sivakumar himself is also honoured with the World Technology Award. ITC e-Choupal case study is taught in the leading business schools around the world.
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| Sivakumar is a Director on the Boards of NABARD, ITC InfoTech India Ltd., Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, IRMA, Centre for Collective Development, and Charities Aid Foundation India. He is on the Executive Committee of India’s National Commodities and Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX) and on the Private Sector Committee of CGIAR. He is an active member of the management committees of various industry bodies and several taskforces of Government of India. |
Umesh Chandra Sarangi
Chairman - NABARD
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Umesh Chandra Sarangi, a senior IAS officer, took over as Chairman, NABARD in December 2007. A gold medallist in Botany and an ace administrator with a career spanning over 30 years Sarangi has deep understanding of the agriculture issues in general and cooperation in particular, having served as Director, Agriculture (1991-94), Secretary, Animal Husbandry, Dairy Development and Fisheries (1999-2000), Commissioner (Cooperation) & Registrar of Cooperative Societies (2003-05). An acknowledged expert in disaster management, he has successfully coped with the extraordinary situation post Latur Earthquake, Orissa super cyclone, Gujarat Earthquake, Mumbai floods etc. He also handled sensitive issues of procurement of Soybean, Cotton and Onion and crushing of surplus sugarcane.
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| He has received several gold medals and awards from the state government for the outstanding public services. As Collector, he prepared a decentralised district development plan for Nasik district which was picked up as a model by the Planning Commission. He is a guest faculty in State training institution since last 20 years, apart from a number of national and state level training institutions. |
Vijay Mahajan
Chairman, Basix
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Vijay Mahajan is an Indian social entrepreneur and chairman of BASIX, a group he founded in 1996. Today, BASIX has supported the livelihoods of over a million rural poor households, of which a third have been supported directly with micro-credit worth over Rs 1000 crore.
Mahajan was selected an ‘Outstanding Social Entrepreneur’ by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 2002. He has been a keynote speaker to the OECD Foreign Aid Ministers in Paris in 2004, at the Geneva Private Equity Conference on Microfinance, 2005; and at the Goldman Sachs global forum on microfinance, 2006. In 2002, Mahajan was selected as one of the 60 ‘Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs’ at the World Economic Forum (WEF), Davos and in 2003, he was conferred the ‘Distinguished Alumnus Award’ by the IIT, Delhi. In 2008, Vijay was elected as a Member of the Ashoka Fellowship, a global association of leading social entrepreneurs. He was also selected in India’s 50 Most Powerful People 2009 by the Business Week.
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| He has been an advisor to the Planning Commission, Government of India, the state governments of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Sikkim, and to the RBI and NABARD. |
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