Premji Junior gets elected to Nasscom governing body

Rishad Hashim Premji, the eldest son of Wipro Chairman Azim Hashim Premji and the chief strategy officer for Wipro’s IT services business, has been elected to the Nasscom’s executive council. This is for the first time the junior Premji is getting to play a bigger role outside Wipro.

Nasscom is the IT sector’s umbrella body.

Executive council members, who have a tenure of two years, get elected by Nasscom members through an online voting process.

According to Nasscom, it received 57 nominations, of which only 18 members got elected. Sources said Wipro nominated Rishad Premji this year since T K Kurien, the CEO of its IT business, who was already in the Nasscom’s executive council last year, had been unable to attend any of its meetings.

Within Wipro, Rishad Premji’s growth has been fast. An MBA from Harvard Business School with work experiences in global firms such as Bain Consulting and GE, Rishad joined the company in July 2007 as a business manager in the banking and finance division.

In July 2009, he was made a general manager in charge of the investor relations department. In June 2011, he was promoted as a vice-president and chief strategy officer of the company’s IT business. In an earlier interview, Premji had hinted that eventually, Rishad would succeed him as the chairman in the company even though he did not give a timeframe for the same. Industry leaders who have been elected to Nasscom’s executive council for 2013-15 include Avinash Vashistha (chairman & MD of Accenture India), Aruna Jayanthi (CEO of Capgemini India), Arvind Thakur (CEO of NIIT Technologies), Bhaskar Pramanik (chairman of Microsoft India), C P Gurnani (CEO of Mahindra Satyam) and Krishnakumar Natarajan (co-founder and CEO of MindTree).  

HCL Technologies' new CEO Anant Gupta, though in the fray for a berth in Nasscom's executive council, could not make it to the final list.

Incidentally, most of the members of the new executive council are representatives of large Indian and global IT/BPO companies. Even though Nasscom recently announced it would expand its focus areas to include ecommerce and software products under its ambit, not a single member from those segments managed to get a berth in its executive council this year. However, Nasscom said it does not have any control over the election process, which is open to all members who have paid their fees for the year.

“However, we do have an extended executive council as a part of which the executive council members can nominate six members, and we will surely fill the gap by bringing in members from sectors which might not have made it to the EC through election process,” Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice-president of Nasscom, told Business Standard.