Surya Narayan Panigrahi has spent more than 36 years with one employer. He has hardly spent them in one place.
NTPC has appointed Panigrahi executive director – HR, elevating an HR leader whose career has taken him across power stations, regional headquarters and the company’s corporate centre.
Before taking charge, Panigrahi was executive director (HR)-cum-regional head of HR for NTPC’s Northern and Southern Regions. In December 2025, he took additional responsibility for the Northern Region while continuing to lead HR for the Southern Region. His elevation to executive director – HR took effect on 8 June 2026.
The long tenure has given Panigrahi experience across a broad stretch of NTPC’s operating footprint. His assignments have included Talcher Kaniha in Odisha, Vindhyachal in Madhya Pradesh, APCPL Jhajjar in Haryana and Tanda in Uttar Pradesh, as well as the corporate centre in New Delhi and regional headquarters in Hyderabad and Lucknow.
That geographical movement has been accompanied by considerable functional breadth. Across his career, Panigrahi has worked in recruitment, training and development, industrial relations, employee welfare, administration, security, CSR and HR digitalisation.
Some of that experience came at a time when the infrastructure of HR itself was changing.
During his stint at NTPC’s corporate centre, Panigrahi was involved in the implementation of PeopleSoft HRMS and SAP ERP, as the power company digitised HR processes. He was also involved in developing integrated security systems across the organisation.
He subsequently headed HR at Tanda Super Thermal Power Station before moving into regional HR leadership, eventually overseeing both the Southern and Northern Regions.
The progression makes Panigrahi’s 36 years at NTPC less a story of tenure than one of movement within the same organisation. Plant assignments gave way to corporate responsibilities, which were followed by increasingly broad regional mandates.
His professional engagement has extended outside NTPC as well. Panigrahi has been associated with bodies including NIPM, AIMA, NHRD, SHRM, Power HR Forum and ISTD, and has spoken at professional forums on HR, leadership and organisational development.
For Panigrahi, the latest elevation brings those different strands together. After more than three and a half decades seeing NTPC from its plants, corporate centre and regional headquarters, he now takes on a wider HR leadership mandate within the organisation where his career began.
