Anil Gaur joins Akums Pharmaceuticals as group chief people officer

Anil Gaur has moved from Uniparts to join Akums Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, as group chief people officer.

As Gaur shares with HRKatha, Akums is at a growth stage and he will have to play a crucial role in stepping up the HR for the company. The Company employs close to 17,500 people and has robust plans to grow in the future.

The contract research and manufacturing organisation, claims to produce close to 11-12 per cent of the drugs consumed in the country. The Company has over 12 manufacturing facilities in India, which are very well equipped to produce all kinds of modern tablets, hard-gelatin capsules, soft-gelatin capsules, powder in sachets, liquid syrups and suspensions, injections, eye/ear drops, ointments, creams, gels, lotions, ayurveda and herbal preparations, nutraceutical and cosmetic preparations and much more.

Apart from taking people practices to a higher level for the Company, his role will also involve taking on a lot of responsibilities pertaining to cultural and business transformation, reveals Gaur to HRKatha.

In the past, Gaur has worked at various known brands, such as Dabur, Tata Power, Eicher, Blue Star, Maruti Suzuki, Otis Elevators and many more. However, he prefers to develop HR practices in smaller companies. He believes that in a big firm, as an HR leader, the role is not that fulfilling and satisfying because it involves mostly maintenance work. However, working in a small company gives one satisfaction and a sense of fulfilment an accomplishment. “In my current role, HR needs real intervention for the business to grow further,” shares Gaur.

Under Gaur’s leadership, Akums aims to become the employer of choice and create a workplace, which attracts the best-in-class talent in the pharma sector. In this role, though Gaur will be based out of the capital, and the job will involve a lot of travelling to other manufacturing sites and R&D centres.

In his checkered career, Gaur has served significantly long stints with organisations.

He served with Maruti Suzuki for seven years from 2005 to 2013 as general manager HR responsible to handling strategic HR and plant HR for the company. After Maruti, when Gaur moved on to Jubilant Life Sciences as the vice president HR, he served with the company for almost five years where Gaur was involved in formulating key HR interventions for the company as part of its strategic HR agenda. With Dabur also, Gaur served for five years as an HR manager and was involved in revamping the HR processes and implemented a structured employee satisfaction survey mechanism for the company.

An illustrious HR leader, Gaur started his career in July 1990 as a personnel officer with Nicco Batteries. He carries close to three decades of experience in the HR space.

Having led Indian and multinational groups in engineering, FMCG, and automotive, Gaur comes with best-in-class HR experience in business partnering, leadership transition and development, people capability and employee engagement.

He has a bachelor’s degree in social work from JMI, New Delhi and a master’s degree in human resource management from the same institute.