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Bharti Enterprises
When Sunil Bharti Mittal set up a small manufacturing unit making bicycle parts in Ludhiana in 1976, he was barely 18. Fifty years later, the founder of Bharti Enterprises is presiding over a business empire whose flagship, Bharti Airtel, has become one of the world's largest telecommunications companies. The journey from bicycle crankshafts to mobile networks, submarine cables and satellite communications has been marked by bets that often ran ahead of the market, setbacks triggered by policy changes and three major crises that Mittal describes as Bharti's "Mahabharatas". Now, as the group marks its 50th anniversary, Mittal is preparing for another transformation. He wants Airtel to evolve from a telecommunications operator into a digitally enabled technology company, with connectivity at its core and businesses spanning artificial intelligence, sovereign cloud, digital finance and satellite services. His prescription for India's digital economy is equally expansive: higher mobile
Bharti Airtel Founder and Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said India must keep control of the "kill switch" for satellite communications on its own soil, as the government weighs security conditions that will decide when satellite broadband goes live. "The kill switch, as we call it, should not be sitting somewhere else," Mittal said in an interview with PTI marking Bharti Enterprises' 50th year. "India must have control over its own space destiny." He did not name a company in that remark. The kill switch is the ability to cut off, throttle or restrict a satellite network's service, whether for a single terminal, a region or an entire country, from the operator's control systems and ground gateways. In satellite broadband, user terminals connect to satellites, which relay traffic to ground stations and then to the internet, so whoever runs those control and gateway systems can in principle disable users or reroute their data. Governments see it as a security tool. It would let them s
IT services firm Coforge Ltd has appointed former Bharti Enterprises vice-chairman Akhil Kumar Gupta as its chairperson and non-executive independent director for five years, effective Tuesday. The appointment follows weeks of intense boardroom turmoil, triggered by the abrupt resignation of former chairman and veteran banker O P Bhatt on September 9 after an internal audit revealed that he had withheld a board evaluation report that assigned his own performance category the lowest rating. The fallout, which wiped out more than Rs 4,400 crore in the company's market valuation as shares tumbled over 5 per cent, escalated within days when Coforge's nomination and remuneration committee (NRC) chairperson D K Singh also quit, citing "differences" and "tension" between independent and executive directors. Following the exits, the company named non-executive independent director Vivek Sharma as interim chairperson and roped in global executive search firm Egon Zehnder to lead the hunt fo
With India projected to become a USD 10 trillion economy, a global corporate strategy that overlooks this market risks missing a defining growth story of the next decade, according to Rajan Bharti Mittal, Vice Chairman of Bharti Enterprises. Mittal noted that growth will increasingly be driven by co-creation and long-term partnerships. He was speaking at the UK-India Week 2026 during the session 'India's Growth Story: Building the Next Decade of UK-India Opportunity'. As India moves from a USD 4 trillion to a projected USD 10 trillion economy, any global corporate strategy that overlooks this market risks missing the defining growth story of the next decade, according to Mittal. Mittal believes that amid reshaping of the global order, India stands out as a rare bright spot of growth and stability. With strong domestic consumption, a young population, and rising manufacturing strength, India is becoming central to the global economy, he noted. According to him, the opportunity is .