Category Archives: Leadership

Mr. Robin Sarkar

Robin Sarkar has been associated with the Shiv Nadar Foundation for over 14 years. He has been an integral part of Shiksha Initiative from the conceptualization stage and has successfully led it from the initial pilot stage to the current hyper-scaling stage. He has been involved with all Shiv Nadar Foundation institutions and initiatives providing him a unique and deep understanding of the Foundation’s philosophy, which he has channeled towards developing the Shiksha Initiative. His innovative ideas coupled with strong focus on execution have helped Shiksha expand and achieve desired results within a short period of time. Robin graduated with Honors in Physics and has an MBA in advertising. He has worked in advertising and branding roles with HCL and advertising agencies.

Mr. Sundar Mahalingam

Sundar is the President-Strategy of HCL Corporation and the Shiv Nadar Foundation. He has been responsible for building the HCL brand over the last decade in its journey to becoming a $10.8 billion, 187,000 people strong enterprise.
He is a core member of the Shiv Nadar Foundation Team and has worked from inception on many of its diverse initiatives, including VidyaGyan, a leadership academy for the rural underprivileged students; the Shiv Nadar University, a comprehensive multi-disciplinary university with strong research orientation, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India’s largest private philanthropic museum with the vision to take art to the common public.

His professional experience spans almost 25 years in various roles in technology marketing, advertising and strategy planning. Prior to joining HCL, he has led the strategic marketing and communication initiatives of various technology companies like Microsoft and Hexaware Technologies. He has worked with J. Walter Thompson in communication strategy development for many years.

Sundar earned his B. Tech degree in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, and a PGDM from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Mr. Pawan K Danwar

Pawan is a finance professional and serves as the Executive Vice-President & CFO of HCL Corporation. He brings over 22 years of vast experience to HCL. His association with the HCL group spans over 17 years and he has served in several different finance profiles in the organization such as Business Finance, Corporate Restructuring, Acquisition & Business Integration, Treasury (fund raising, investment & forex management), Planning & Strategy, Commercial, Business Development, Secretarial, Legal & Corporate Compliance and investor relationship. He has structured and negotiated some big business contracts for HCL in the past decade.

Pawan has not only been instrumental in shaping different financial strategies for HCL but he has also been associated with various new business initiatives and is credited with turning them into big scale ventures over the period. Out of 17 years with the HCL Group, he has spent 14 years in operating companies in various capacities including driving P&L.

He has ample exposure in the international business environment and has travelled extensively while executing various deals. Pawan is also associated with the Shiv Nadar Foundation, one of India’s largest private philanthropic institutions, for the last 3 years. He also handles liaisons with various government departments and institutions.

Pawan is a qualified Chartered Accountant & Company Secretary.

Mr. Shikhar Malhotra

Shikhar Malhotra is the Director and Board Member of HCL Corporation, the holdco for HCL’s operating companies. HCL has a distinguished lineage as one of India’s original technology garage start-ups, founded by Shiv Nadar. He is also on the board of HCL Technologies, a $11.5 Billion global technology firm with over 209,000 professionals operating from 52 countries.

Shikhar serves as the Vice Chairman & CEO of HCL Healthcare, one of India’s largest corporate health solutions firms, providing end-to-end healthcare solutions with a vision to make corporate India a healthier place. Today, HCL Healthcare is delivering personalized, sustainable and managed care health solutions to organizations across sectors including technology and banking. It has eight world-class corporate health centers across the country serving over 70,000 families.

As a Trustee, Shikhar plays multiple roles at the Shiv Nadar Foundation including shaping its vision of nation building through transformational leadership. Shikhar is the founding CEO of Shiv Nadar Schools (established in 2012), having led them to become one of the most coveted schools in the National Capital Region of Delhi, and consistently recognized among the top schools in the country. The Shiv Nadar Schools are known to push the benchmarks in education to impart critical life lessons and making students future ready for a complex global environment.

In September 2018, Shikhar took over the role of the Pro Chancellor of Shiv Nadar University, India’s youngest university chosen as an Institution of Eminence by the Government of India. Today, SNU is one of the only eight private universities in the country acknowledged for being on an accelerated path to emerge as a world-class research-based, multidisciplinary institution.

Passionate about wildlife and conservation, Shikhar co-founded The Habitats Trust in 2018 with his wife Roshni Nadar Malhotra. The Trust is empowering on-ground conservationists to achieve its vision of securing India’s natural habitats and their indigenous species.

Shikhar comes from an entrepreneurial family, raised in Kuwait. His early lessons as an entrepreneur were learnt at his family business and were later sharpened at Babson College in the US, with a specialization in entrepreneurship.

Shikhar is passionate about sports and football in particular. He is married to Roshni Nadar Malhotra and they have two sons.

Ms. Roshni Nadar Malhotra

Roshni Nadar Malhotra is the Chairperson of HCLTech, a leading global technology organization with a market capitalization of $34 billion, and the Chairperson of its CSR Board Committee.

Roshni is a Trustee of the Shiv Nadar Foundation. Since its inception, the Shiv Nadar Foundation has invested $1.2 billion in nation building institutions and driving transformational leadership. Roshni is also the Chairperson and driving force behind VidyaGyan, a leadership academy for the economically underprivileged, meritorious, rural students of Uttar Pradesh, and has been working towards nurturing future leaders from rural India who can be catalysts of change for their communities, villages and the nation at large. In 2023, VidyaGyan was a recipient of the Children’s Champion Award from the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights (DCPCR) for identifying and nurturing students from underserved rural backgrounds into future leaders through high-quality education.

Passionate about wildlife and conservation, Roshni established The Habitats Trust in 2018. The Foundation aims to work towards protecting India’s natural habitats and its indigenous species with the core mission of creating and conserving sustainable ecosystems through strategic partnerships and collaborations with all stakeholders, at every level.

Roshni is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council at the MIT School of Engineering, USA and also a member of the Kellogg School of Management Executive Board for Asia. She serves on the board of directors of US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) and is an independent director on the board of HDFC Asset Management Company.

In recognition of her outstanding work both in business and in philanthropy, Roshni has received several honors and accolades. Some of these include being featured for the sixth consecutive year in ‘The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women’ list, compiled and released by Forbes in 2022. In 2020, Forbes also featured her among the ‘25 Most Powerful Businesswomen in Asia’. Roshni was honored with the ‘Most Powerful Women in Business 2023’ by Business Today. Roshni was conferred with Lewis Institute Community Changemaker Award by Babson College in 2017 and was recognized by Horasis, an internationally renowned think tank, as the ‘Indian Business Leader of the Year 2019. She is an alumnus of the Forum of Young Global Leaders (YGL, 2014-19), a unique and diverse community of the world’s most outstanding, next-generation leaders, an initiative of the World Economic Forum.

Since 2019, she has been producing a TV series for the Animal Planet/Discovery based on the most endangered wildlife species in India – ‘On The Brink’. In 2022, On The Brink episode on Bats was the recipient of the Best Indian National Film Award in the category of science & technology. In 2018, Roshni also produced a children’s film, ‘Halkaa’, directed by the National Awardee Nila Madhab Panda. The movie is based on the unique journey of a slum child battling the issue of open defecation.

Roshni holds an undergraduate degree in Communications from Northwestern University and a MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. At Kellogg, she was awarded the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award. In 2023, Roshni was conferred with the Schaffner Award by Kellogg for her contribution to the society.

Mr. Shiv Nadar

Shiv Nadar is the Founder of HCL Group and the Shiv Nadar Foundation. He is also the Chairman Emeritus & Strategic Advisor to the Board of HCLTech, a $13.3 billion global organization with 227,481 professionals operating from 60 countries.

Nadar is credited with being one of the pioneers of the computing and IT industry in India. Under his guidance HCL has continued to ride the waves of the changing IT landscape for over 45 years and remain at the forefront of every technological revolution since 1976. While HCL started off as a hardware organization, manufacturing the country’s first indigenous computers and introducing them to the Indian consumer, it eventually evolved into a more comprehensive software services organization. HCL is in fact one of the few global IT companies founded in the 1970s that remains in existence to date.

Throughout his career, Nadar always acknowledged that successful institution building is dependent on forging result-oriented partnerships and creating new knowledge. He steered HCL to create several valuable joint ventures and alliances that aided the organization’s emergence as a global technology enterprise. His pioneering spirit and belief in engineering and research shaped the course of the organization and is the reason that today HCLTech boasts one of the largest IT Engineering and R&D divisions in the world.

Nadar started his career as part of the elite DCM management trainee system. It was at DCM that he met the people with whom he later started HCL in a Delhi Barsati “akin to a garage startup” with a compelling vision that the microprocessor would change the world.

Nadar credits his success to the education and scholarships that he received during his early years. He has always maintained that access to quality education is the most potent tool of transformation and therefore, in 1994, he established the philanthropic – Shiv Nadar Foundation. The Foundation draws heavily on Nadar’s experience of building a world-class organization like HCL. It endeavors to create institutions of transformational education that will continue to influence and nurture the country’s youth for decades to come. To this effect, the Shiv Nadar Foundation has established six institutions covering the entire spectrum of education, which aim to address the issue of quality in education, create lasting partnerships and have a strong research orientation.

As of March 2022, Nadar has invested US$1.2 billion through the Foundation, impacting over 39,000 students and alumni directly. However, the Foundation’s ultimate aim is to nurture the next generation of leaders in the ideologies of symbiotic growth so that each of them may in turn aspire to affect a small change, creating a large multiplier effect. The impact of the Shiv Nadar Foundation institutions is today reflected in the aspirations of meritorious students who started their journeys from humble, geographically, remote backgrounds but are today pursuing their dreams in India as well as other countries.

In recognition of his pioneering role in business and philanthropy in India and across the globe, Nadar has received several honors and accolades, notable being the Padma Bhushan from the President of India in 2008.

Nadar is married to Kiran, an Asian Games medalist and internationally renowned bridge player. She is also one of the largest Indian Art collectors in the world.