Leaders to Watch: who to watch in Indian business

Big story
Aasif Malbari’s pay terms at Godrej Consumer put a range and a cap on the bonus. The terms approved for Sudhir Sitapati in August did not.
Shareholders approved the new chief executive’s terms on 7 October, with a target range and a cap for his performance-linked pay. The company’s filings also show what his predecessor was paid in…

Analysis
Before Ashiss Kumar Dash takes over, Salil Parekh’s FY26 pay shows how Infosys counts stock units
Analysis
Part of Vibha Padalkar’s pay for FY26 was approved after the year closed
Analysis
Albinder Dhindsa took over Eternal and waived his salary from the first day
Analysis
Airtel’s handover splits FY26 chief executive pay between Gopal Vittal and Shashwat Sharma

Data · FY26What the Nifty 50’s chief executives were paid, read from their own annual reportsSee the table →

The Leaders

Class of 2026 · updated when they move

Aasif Malbari

Managing Director and CEO, Godrej Consumer Products

Handed a company the morning its shares fell 10%, because the man who had just told analysts the plan had walked out.

Abhay Soi

Chairman and Managing Director, Max Healthcare Institute Limited

“If it didn’t work out I would have thought of flipping it a couple of years later.” That is how Abhay Soi described his first hospital to Forbes India, nine years after he took it on, while admitting that he had known very little about the hospital business when he did. The hospital was BL […]

Albinder Dhindsa

Chief Executive Officer, Eternal

He built Blinkit, was twice asked to leave by the man whose company bought it, and now runs that company. The habit underneath is a willingness to declare his own model wrong and pay to replace it.

Ananya Birla

Founder and Chairperson, Svatantra Microfin Limited

Founded what became India's second largest NBFC-MFI at seventeen, held it through the worst two years the sector has had in a decade, and is selling none of it in its own IPO.

Arun Misra

Chief Executive Officer, Vedanta Limited

Vedanta’s board gave Arun Misra one year to prove that splitting itself into five companies created value rather than paperwork. The business it handed him to prove it with is the one he was already running. On 30 July 2026, the same afternoon Vedanta Limited reported a 72 per cent jump in consolidated net profit […]

Ashiss Kumar Dash

CEO Designate, Infosys Limited

“He’s an uncomplicated guy, focused on what needs to be done.” That was how Nandan Nilekani, the chairman of Infosys, described the man the board had just chosen to run it, at a press conference on 23 July 2026, in a year when nearly everything else said about Indian IT services was complicated. Ashiss Kumar […]

Deepinder Goyal

Vice Chairman and Non-Executive Director, Eternal Limited

He paid ₹4,447 crore for a grocery company the market said would poison him, held it through a 20% drawdown, and then renamed the whole company after it. The bet was his. The execution was somebody else's.

Irina Ghose

Managing Director, India, Anthropic

Anthropic did not hire a researcher for India. It hired Microsoft India's former managing director, and seven months later the thing she has built is a sales channel, not a brand.

Jayshree Ullal

Chair, President and Chief Executive Officer, Arista Networks

She left a safe Cisco seat for a fifty-person startup with no revenue. Eighteen years later, it's worth a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Kunal Shah

Global Head of WhatsApp, Meta

Twice he has taken something Indians treat as a chore and made it feel like a privilege. Now he runs WhatsApp.

Leena Nair

Global Chief Executive Officer, Chanel

Twenty-nine years arguing for Unilever's people. Now she runs Chanel.

Miten Sampat

Interim CEO, CRED

He built other people's companies bigger for a decade. Now he's ruling out mergers and shipping products of his own, two months into running the one he didn't found.

Nandita Sinha

Chief Executive Officer, Instamart, Swiggy

Thirteen years at Flipkart deciding what goes on a shelf, then four years running Myntra, where she built rapid delivery without shrinking the catalogue. Swiggy has hired her to win quick commerce on range, inside 1,171 rooms of about 4,200 square feet each.