Our speakers

Santanu Paul, CEO and MD, TalentSprint

Santanu is CEO and MD at TalentSprint, a high growth venture he co-founded in the area of professional skills development, employability, and inclusion. He drives strategy, growth and execution, and is building a high performance organization where world-class professionals can deliver exceptional value to customers and all stakeholders. The vision is to transform TalentSprint into a global leader by 2015.

From 2003-2008, Santanu served at Virtusa Corporation as Senior Vice President, Global Delivery Operations, and Head, Indian Operations. From 1999-2003, Santanu worked in Boston as Chief Technology Officer of Openpages and Viveca, a B2B technology startup. He began his career in New York at the famed IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His work on technology spans 20 international papers and 2 United States patents.

Santanu received a B.Tech. from IIT Madras and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he received the prestigious Rackham Pre-doctoral Fellowship and IBM Canada Fellowship. He is a Distinguished Fellow of IDRBT (set up by the RBI), a Distinguished Fellow of the Skoch Foundation, Vice President of ITsAP, and Director of TiE Hyderabad. His views and opinion pieces have appeared in the Economic Times, Financial Express, Business Standard, Hindu Business Line, Times of India, Hindu, and BBC online.

Santosh Desai, Managing Director & CEO, Future Brands Ltd

Santosh is the ceo and managing director of Futurebrands India Ltd. Before taking up this assignment, he was the President of McCann-Erickson, one of India's premier advertising agencies.

A post-graduate from IIM Ahmedabad, Santosh spent 21 years in advertising and was strategically involved in building key brands for a range of local and multinational clients. He has been a guest lecturer at various national & international universities and has addressed the global management boards of several multinationals including Microsoft, Philips, Hershey's, Unilever, Coke and Reckitt Benckiser.

His principal area of interest lies in studying the relationship between culture and brands. He has been writing a weekly column for the Times of India for over a decade and is author of Mother Pious Lady- Making Sense of Everyday India, a book that examines how the everyday life of middle class India has evolved.

Santosh Kumar, Head & VP - Government Engagement, South Asia, Mastercard

Saran Chatterjee, VP - Products & Mobile Strategy, Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ltd

Saran heads the consumer experience product management team at Flipkart. In this role, he is responsible for creating the most relevant and delightful shopping experience across Mobile and PC.

Prior to Flipkart, he worked with Yahoo! for over six years across diverse functions - including product management for consumer search, search advertising and distribution , product marketing for the display advertising products. He has also held key product development positions at Fujitsu Network Communications.  

Saran’s interest lies in leading and managing world-class products across fast growing new business areas.

Saran holds an MBA degree from the University of California, Berkeley and aBS in Electrical Engineering from Jadavpur University.

Saran Chatterjee, CEO, Housejoy

Saran is currently the CEO of Housejoy. Prior to this, Saran was with Flipkart as VP of Product Management and a key part of the leadership team for close to 3 years. He played a key role in scaling Flipkart by shaping the company strategy, setting up and hiring the product management, design and operations org, heading the consumer experience and platforms teams and running P&L for the advertising business. Before Flipkart, Saran was with Yahoo for about six years in various roles, including senior director for global product management, business management & operations director, among others.

Sarang Lakare, Founder & CEO, Volare Technologies (IntouchApp)

Sarang is an innovator by mind and entrepreneur by heart. He has a BE from COEP (College of Engineering Pune) and Ph.D. in Computer Science from State Univ of New York at Stony Brook. He holds 5 US patents and has over 40 publications to his name. After 12+ years experience working at 2 startups and a Fortune 100 company he moved back to India to pursue the dream of starting up on his own. He is passionate about using mobile technology to simplify life. His current startup is building an innovative Contacts Manager app for the smart phone called "InTouchApp", that promises to simplify how we interact with other people, businesses and organizations. InTouchApp has been downloaded over 2 million times globally and is gaining accolades all over the world. Most recently, TIME magazine mentioned InTouchApp as a successful product coming out of the upcoming global tech hub of Pune city.

Sarangdhar R Nirmal, CMD, Prabhat Dairy

Sarang Nirmal, a quiet, yet effective Chairman, is known for completely changing the landscape of the regional dairy industry today. Through the now eminent company Prabhat-which is one of the INDIA’s leading Milk & Milk products company, this self-made millionaire revolutionized the way everyday people perceived about dairy products, and how the innovative dairy products offering should be part of everyone's daily diet. He built an empire based on the concept that farmer should not only be made a part of quality and clean milk collection but he should act as ‘PARTNER IN PROGRESS’ resulting in producing well-organized solid platform for manufacturing quality and international standards driven dairy products, and that they should be available in effective and affordable pricing for daily consumption to each consumer class. He was one of the first to believe in the "Collective Working" concept, and he actually executed this ideas through ‘PRABHAT QUALITY MISSION’ where each farmer along with his family is a part of the idea of clean and quality milk. Thus, the foundation that he built for the farmers were smaller as compared to earlier scenario but considerably now has revolutionized the movement which changed the dynamics of PRABHAT Group. His vision “To be a highly respectable and leading milk food company, that is committed to thoughtful and sustainable socio-economic development” now has become a legacy for each element associated with Prabhat.

What truly remarkable is that Sarang Nirmal brought the company to greatness in spite of all odds, adversaries which he is faced in beginning, the journey was not so easy, but with immense dedication & passion he successfully build and executed the ambitious plan which helped accomplished numerous milestones further strengthening the PRABHAT forever. His deep knowledge in Agriculture and bonding with the farmers facilitated him a lot. He found a need and serviced that need. Now, his ideologies and guidance had reinvented that company. Most people never have the opportunity to do that once in their lifetimes. Sarang Nirmal has performed it twice. First being the most important key strength in building foundation of Prabhat and second being the most loved Chairman by employees, stake holders and all the farmers associated with it, this is his legacy and way of working which made him earned the title of MOTE ANNA (Big Brother) among all the farming and dairy community.

In his respect and his numerous contributions during his tenure he has been felicitated by numerous awards from Government of India, many dairying and agricultural communities. His four guiding stars INTEGRITY - COMMITMENT - INNOVATION & PROGRESS today are the cornerstones of PRABHAT enriching and enhancing everyone’s lives.

Saransh Aggarwal, CLO, Cognizant

Saransh Agrawal, Global Head - Learning & Development, Cognizant

Saransh Agrawal is Global Head of Learning & Development at Cognizant, leading an award-winning team to drive capability development for the company’s associates. His team is focused on implementing talent development strategies aligned to business growth and creating an agile learning ecosystem for associates to fuel their continuous professional development – whether it’s to stay up to date with the latest emerging technology skills, get ready for the next project, or pursue growth aligned with their personal or professional ambitions. The Cognizant L&D team regularly earns industry recognition through Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Awards and the Association for Talent Development.

Saransh has more than 20 years of experience spanning talent development, performance consulting and learning technology. He holds an MBA in Industrial Management from NITIE (IIM-Mumbai). He has also achieved credentialed coach (ACC) from International Coaching Federation (2015-18).

Sarath Chandra, Chief Information Officer, Airtel Payments Bank

Mr. Chandra is the Chief Information Officer at Airtel Payments Bank, the first payments bank in India. In this capacity he drives digital innovation and transformation of products and services. With close to two decades of work experience, Sarath has worked with tech giants like Google, Amazon and Yahoo. In the past, Sarath has also worked as an Agile Coach and also, an entrepreneur with his venture in the tech space.