Team size: 20

Can you tell us a little about your significant accomplishments over the last few years, as a team or by yourself?

My passion is to build teams, systems, processes, and capabilities in line with the business requirements to enable the company to achieve growth aspirations. I have replicated these changes across organisations, whether new-age or old-economy businesses. Three and half years ago, I moved from the media sector to cement. Through team efforts at UltraTech, we have managed litigations involving regulatory and industry issues worth thousands of crores; these, among other things, involved electricity, mining and environment issues.

Have any recent political, economic or regulatory changes impacted your work? How are you dealing with this?

Mining law reforms in recent times have been significant for sectors involving natural resources, including cement. These reforms aim to unlock minerals and enable ease of business, the most important being the removal of transfer charges involved in transferring mining leases. We partnered with companies to influence these reforms through advocacy and recommendations. Once new regulations and policies came into effect, we worked with the business to implement the same and even agitated issues with the concerned department since there were gaps in implementing positive reforms at the state level.

Another significant development has been jurisprudence around post implementation of Insolvency and Bankruptcy Law (IBC); since UltraTech acquired business (Binani Cement) pursuant to IBC laws, there were significant challenges in the resolution of past liabilities, notably statutory ones, and at UltraTech we have secured path-breaking orders from High Courts and even Supreme Court of India, paving the way for settling jurisprudence around IBC laws.

How has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities?

UltraTech is at the forefront of implementing sustainability reforms – green power and alternate fuel, water positive, CSR efforts, community development initiatives, and a focus on circular economy. UltraTech has committed to Net Zero Concrete and meeting 100% of electricity requirements from renewable sources by 2050. UltraTech has achieved a 9.1% carbon reduction from 2017, and its target is to reduce 27% carbon by 2032. The legal team has partnered with businesses to support and enable all these initiatives, whether it is agitating before the regulatory body on fiscal benefits for green energy reforms, making a necessary recommendation or contractual support for various partnerships, or driving compliance in all these initiatives.