Shankar Venkateswaran to be new Oxfam India Board Chairperson

Shankar Venkateswaran to be new Oxfam India Board Chairperson

Oxfam India has appointed Shankar Venkateswaran as the Chairperson of its Board. From December this year, Shankar Venkateswaran will take over the responsibility from Kiran Karnik, who served as the Board Chairperson for nine years, from August 2010 to December 2019. Kiran Karnik was also the former President of NASSCOM and the Managing Director of Discovery Network in India.

 Mridula Bajaj, Vice-Chairperson of Oxfam India Board will also be moving on. She helped Oxfam India grow as an Indian organisation in the last ten years of her stint.

 Shankar Venkateswaran has over 33 years of experience in the corporate and social development sectors. The initial 12 years of his career were in management consulting, working with A F Ferguson & Co. (now Deloitte). He then moved to the development sector, where he spent 15 years in various positions at not-for-profit organisations including Action Aid. During this time, he also set up the American India Foundation and Partners in Change. In 2012, he joined PwC as Director, where he advised several companies on sustainability strategy and reporting. In 2017, he retired as chief of Tata Sustainability Group.

 Shankar has drafted the National Guidelines for Responsible Business Conduct which were released by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in March 2019. He is one of the founding members of ECube Investment Advisors, an ESG (environment, social and governance) platform launched in January 2019.

 “As I step off after a decade as Chairperson, I am indeed privileged to welcome Shankar as my successor. He brings rich experience from both the corporate sector and the world of civil society, combining professional efficiency with deep sensitivity and an empathy with the disadvantaged. With his guidance and a diverse, distinguished Board, I am sure that the organisation – under the leadership of the widely-respected CEO, Amitabh Behar – will reach ever-greater heights,” said outgoing Board Chairperson Kiran Karnik. 

 Shankar was selected through an extensive search process led by a sub-committee of Oxfam India’s Board.

“I am delighted to be working with Shankar. Globally, he is immensely respected as a leader and acknowledged for representing the best of two sectors—civil society and private sector. He brings passion, empathy, commitment from civil society and the competence and goal focus from the private sector. In these times when boundaries are collapsing, he is a leader who we hope will lead us in this new world. I would also like to thank Kiran Karnik and Mridula Bajaj for leading Oxfam India’s Board as Chairperson and Vice Chairperson for the last 9 years. Their incredible leadership helped us grow and contribute effectively to the fight against poverty and inequality,” said Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar.

Shankar is an engineer and an MBA. He is an amateur stage actor, an enthusiastic weekend tennis player and occasionally dabbles in writing.

"Oxfam India is an organisation I have known and admired for decades for its intellectual heft and its substantive contributions to development in India and globally. I feel privileged to be asked to chair its Board, consisting of such diverse and thoughtful colleagues, and to support the talented and hardworking staff team, led by the highly respected and thoughtful Amitabh Behar, to address the complex development challenges that lie ahead of us. We will miss the towering presence of the outgoing Chair Kiran Karnik, Vice Chair Mridula Bajaj and other members who have left a rich legacy of governance which the rest of us have to live up to," said Oxfam India’s incoming Board Chairperson Shankar Venkateswaran.

Oxfam India Board has 12 members with diverse backgrounds and experience.

About Oxfam India:

Oxfam India is building a movement of people and grassroots organisations, working together to fight injustice and discrimination. We work to bring deep-rooted sustainable changes in people’s lives. We do this through long-term development programming and link it to positive policy changes at various levels. We work for the socially excluded and most marginalised communities by mobilising them to campaign for greater economic and social reforms. We save, protect and rebuild lives in the times of crisis and humanitarian disasters.

For media queries please contact Himanshi Matta, 91-8860182310 or write at himanshi@oxfamindia.org