Subodh Bhargava, Chairman
Subodh Bhargava joined us as a trustee and Chairman in June 2005. He currently serves as an advisor to the Eicher Group of Companies. He retired as Group Chairman and Chief Executive of the Eicher Group in March 2000 after a tenure spanning 25 years in the organization. Prior to that Subodh worked for Balmer Lawrie & Co in Calcutta where he began his professional career.
A key spokesperson for Indian industry, Subodh is a former president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the Association of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, and a former vice president of the Tractor Manufacturers Association. He contributes to and influences government policy while simultaneously working with industry to evolve new responses to the changing environment. He is the Chairman of Wartsila and VSNL and is on the board of directors of several other leading Indian companies.
Mr Bhargava has been closely associated with technical and management education in India. He currently serves on the boards of the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi, and the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, Ahmedabad.
Mr Bhargava holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Roorkee.
Renu Sud Karnad, Vice Chair
Renu Sud Karnad is Executive Director of Housing Development Finance Corporation Ltd (HDFC Ltd). She has been a CAF India Trustee since September 2004. She is also a member of the Investment Committee at HDFC Bank and liaisons for the organisation with various central and state government ministries and the regulator, the National Housing Bank.
Renu is on several national and international boards and interacts closely with multi-lateral agencies such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Commonwealth Development Corporation.
A law graduate in criminology from Bombay University and a post-graduate in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, Renu is a proud mother of two. Her husband, Bharat, is a Research Professor at the prestigious Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Noshir H Dadrawala
Noshir joined us as a trustee in May 2004 and is currently the Executive Secretary of the Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy.
He is an internationally recognised authority on philanthropy and has written extensively on the subject. He serves on several committees dealing with charitable issues and has presented and published several research papers on the subject.
Noshir shares his knowledge on voluntary organisations in India by conducting seminars, conferences and training programmes. He is also a guest lecturer at the N.M. Institute of Management Studies, and a correspondent and regular contributor to newspapers and magazines.
He is a trustee of the India Sponsorship Committee, The Polson Charity Trust, Resource Alliance, and is also a member of the Governing Council of the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium, The Helen Keller Institute for the Deaf and Deaf-Blind, The J.D. Bharda Education Society and the Committee on Social Development and Community Affairs of the Confederation of Indian Industries.
Rati Forbes
Rati has been a CAF India Trustee since September 2004. She is Director of Forbes Marshall, a company involved in providing solutions in energy efficiency and process automation.
At Forbes Marshall, Rati is responsible for Human Resources. The company's social welfare activities also come under her wing.
Rati is an active member of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII); she chairs the Community Development Committee of the CII and has been promoting Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the CII and other forums.
She is actively involved in social and community development, especially in and around Pune where she lives. She is an active member of the Pratham Pune Educational Foundation and is the Vice-chairperson of Action for Self-reliance Hope and Awareness (ASHA), an organisation that works on women's and children's issues.
Sanjay Gupta
Sanjay joined us as a trustee in November 2007.
Keeping in line with his aspirations of volunteering some personal time for the social development sector, Sanjay is involved with strategic initiatives of several not-for-profit organisations including CAF India.
Sanjay is Senior Vice-President and Senior Executive, India with American Express. He joined American Express more than a decade ago and has held various senior positions in Delhi, New York and Singapore. At American Express Sanjay has led major transformational changes in the areas of Financial Operations and Customer Servicing.
Sanjay has 23 years of work experience across industries. Prior to Amex, Sanjay held senior roles with Motorola, Pepsico and Eicher.
Kashi N Memani
Kashi N Memani became one of our trustees in February 2007.
A former Chairman and Country Managing Partner of Ernst & Young, India, Kashi specializes in business and corporate advisory, foreign taxation, and financial consultancy. He advises domestic and foreign companies on corporate matters and has helped multi-national companies set up businesses in India.
Kashi was a member of the Expert Committee constituted by the Ministry of the Company Law for the amendment of the Companies Act. He is a member of the National Advisory Committee on Accounting Standards (NACAS) and a member of the Accounting Standard Board of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. He served on the External Audit Committee (EAC) of the International Monetary Fund for two consecutive years and was appointed Chairman of the EAC for the year 1999-2000. He serves on the boards of several companies, institutions and chambers of commerce.
Ajay S Mehta
Ajay S Mehta is the Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the National Foundation for India (NFI). He became a CAF India Trustee in November 2006. The NFI is a philanthropic, not for profit, charitable trust that raises resources for supporting development action. As the Chief Executive, Ajay leads a team of professionals under three functional areas: Programmes, Fund Raising and Public Information, and Administration and Finance.
Prior to joining the NFI, Ajay was General Secretary of the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development (AVARD). Between 1990-1999 he was Chief Executive of Seva Mandir, Udaipur. Seva Mandir is a voluntary organization working with the rural poor on issues dealing with health, education, gender equality, building people's organizations and rural livelihoods. Currently Ajay is the President of the Board of Trustees of Seva Mandir.
Ajay graduated from Yale University and did his M. Phil in Economics from Jawarhal Lal Nehru University. In 1993-94 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University.
Russell Prior
Russell Prior is the CAF UK representative on the Board of CAF India. He took up this role in November 2006.
Russell joined CAF UK in the autumn of 2005. He is responsible for Company Giving, including Give As You Earn, CAF Company Account and Company Trusts.
Two decades with Barclays furnished Russell with a wealth of knowledge and experience of the banking sector. At Barclays his roles included General Manager of Offshore Corporate Banking, Marketing Director of Premier Banking, and Strategy and Transformation Director of Premier Banking.
Anil Sachdev
Anil Sachdev became a CAF India Trustee in September 2004. He is a Founder Member of Eicher Consultancy Services (ECS).
After working for 36 years in the corporate field, Anil started Grow Talent Company Limited based in Gurgaon, India. Grow Talent was conceived by him to develop and manage the talent of employees in organisations. The mission of Grow Talent is to partner organisations in this crucial process of 'Talent Management'.
Anil is deeply committed to the eradication of poverty, corruption, and illiteracy. He has also set up a not for profit organization in Florida called the Foundation for Human and Economic Development. A deeply spiritual individual, his hope is to spur not just material wealth, but also human competence and learning abilities, life-sustaining values and a healthy social fabric.
Prema Sagar
Prema became one of our trustees in February 2007. She is Principal and Founder of Genesis Public Relations, which she set up in November 1992.
An alumna of the Frank Jefkins Institute of Public Relations, UK, she has been instrumental in the setting up of the Public Relations Consultants Association of India (PRCAI) and was its Founding President. Prema has also been associated with various international public relations organizations. She is currently the Council Member for India of the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) and has been on the Board of Management of the International Communication Consultancies Organisation (ICCO).
Genesis Foundation, a trust created for the welfare of abandoned children, is the core of Prema's life's mission. Prema is also a Member of the CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) Core Group on Disability.
S Sivakumar
S Sivakumar joined us as a trustee in September 2004. He is the Chief Executive of ITC Limited's Agri-Business Group in India.
He spearheads ITC's e-Choupal venture, a unique channel, which facilitates the two-way flow of goods and services into and out of villages. Servicing the production and consumption needs of some two million farmers in 18,000 villages, e-Choupal is the largest Internet based intervention in rural India by a corporate.
A graduate of the Institute of Rural Management (IRMA), Anand, he served with a farmers' cooperative in Gujarat for six years before joining ITC in 1989. He is also on the boards of several companies.
M P Vasimalai
M P Vasimalai became one of our trustees in September 2004. He is currently the Executive Director of DHAN (Development of Humane Action) Foundation, Madurai.
Through the DHAN Foundation, he has been able to touch the lives of thousands of poor women and farmers in different ways: ensuring micro finance is available to the former, and organising the latter to religiously protect their natural water sources such as tanks and ponds.
He has served as Vice-President of the Conservation and Development Forum (CDF) at the University of Florida, Vice-President of the International Network for Alternate Financial Institutions (INAFI) and Executive Member of an Advisory Board in the Ministry of Water Resources.
M P Vasimalai holds a Post Graduate degree in agriculture. He also studied at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and it was during this period that his professional goal to work in the field of development became clear. He went on to join a non-governmental organisation called Pradan (Professional Assistance for Development Action). From Pradan he later moved to DHAN.