Forbes India Leadership Awards 2019: India's best business leaders

The Forbes India Leadership Awards (FILA), now in its ninth year, are an acknowledgement of corporate excellence, visionary leadership and innovation. Our distinguished jury navigated the corporate landscape to identify companies and business leaders worthy of the honour.

The year gone by could not have been worse for corporate India. The country is in the midst of a slowdown with the pace of growth slowest in over six years. A deeper crisis looms large. The government is yet to admit this, but Krishnamurthy Subramanian, chief economic advisor to the government, has spoken about “signs of a slowdown”. In such a scenario, achieving corporate excellence, turning around business fortunes, or scaling up startups is rare.

Besides the quantitative data, which includes operating performance, efficiency measures and evaluation with peers, Forbes India looked at qualitative factors to map leadership skills, quality of corporate governance, and effective management.

This year, we included a Special Jury category to recognise the efforts of Bhaskar Bhat, whose transformation of Titan and role in the Tata Group cannot be ignored. Havell India’s Anil Rai Gupta wins the Entrepreneur for the Year award for maintaining critical growth rates (revenue grew by a CAGR of 18 percent in five years to ₹10,058 crore) in a tough business cycle, while readying for organic growth. Shiv Nadar, like Azim Premji in 2018, wins the Lifetime Achievement Award, for not just revolutionising India’s technology landscape but also building HCL Technologies into a global enterprise across 44 countries. Nadar’s contributions towards his philanthropic foundation are also noteworthy. 

The other business leaders to be honoured are Xiaomi’s Manu Kumar Jain (Best CEO-MNC), Marico’s Saugata Gupta (Best CEO-Private Sector), Indraprastha Gas’s Managing Director ES Ranganathan (Best Company-Public Sector) and Parle Agro’s Nadia Chauhan (GenNext Entrepreneur), who has revamped sales and distribution and innovated with products to grow in size. Sandeep Patel, who founded Nepra—a waste management business—wins the award for Entrepreneur with Social Impact, for growing at 100 percent in the past year. Rapidly growing online B2B ecommerce marketplace Udaan wins the award for Outstanding Startup.

Methodology
The process started almost four months ago, with extensive research on qualitative and quantitative parameters. The long-list of names in each category was whittled down by September and narrowed down to a strong set of five to eight nominees. In October, the high-powered jury headed by Harsh Mariwala, founder and chairman of Marico, went through the nominations and decided on the winners. The other jury members were Ashu Suyash, Gautam Kumra, Mihir Doshi, Saurabh Mukherjea and Puneet Bhatia. KPMG, Forbes India’s knowledge partner, helped with the content for dockets sent to the jury; Veratech Intelligence helped with financial data of the companies.