Another high-profile exit at Reliance Power

This time, CEO J P Chalasani quits company

In the second high-profile exit from Reliance Power this year, the company’s chief executive, J P Chalasani, has resigned from the company. Another senior executive, Ashwin Kumar, had quit the company to join L&T’s power development arm in January.

“Chalasani would leave the company towards the end of the year to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions and re-locate overseas,” the company said in a communication to stock exchanges. Chalasani did not respond to calls and texts sent about his future ventures.

“R-Power has been trying to recruit a person in the leadership role for the company for more than three months now. This is not a surprise exit,” said a top power sector executive, who has been approached for the job. The company is known to have already shortlisted at least five candidates for the job.

Chalasani joined the undivided Ambani Group in 1995 and had worked on many power projects of the group, including the captive project of the Jamnagar oil refinery. After the group was split by Mukesh and Anil Ambani, he chose to go to the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group, where he became the director of business development of Reliance Energy (now called Reliance Infrastructure). A month after, when Reliance Power was listed on stock exchanges after being spun off Reliance Infra, he was elevated to the position of a chief executive officer.

Before joining the Reliance Group, the engineering graduate from the Regional Engineering College in Nagpur started his career with the country’s largest power producer, NTPC. He had worked in many roles at the company, one of them being the executive assistant to the chairman of the company. While he has been associated with power generation for the last five years, Chalasani had worked on power distribution as well. He served as the chief executive of BSES Rajdhani Power and was a former NTPC executive involved in the revamp of distribution businesses, as privatisation took over. Another such executive from NTPC, Anil Sardana, had moved on to become the managing director of Tata Power.