Kotak Mahindra rejigs HR team post Khatavkar’s exit

Sukhjit Pasricha has put in his papers as the chief human resource officer, Bajaj Finance. He is all set to take on his new role as group CHRO, Kotak Mahindra Bank from May 2019.

Pasricha will replace Makarand Khatavkar who resigned as the group CHRO in December 2018.

Pasricha, who has over 22 years of experience in the HR domain out of which he has spent more than 12 years in the telecom sector. In his current role, he is the CHRO at Bajaj Finance. Prior to that he was head-HR at Indigo.

His longest stint was with Bharti Airtel where he spent close to 9.5 years. He was the head-HR, AES for three years. Later he was elevated as V-P, HR for Northern Region of Airtel’s mobile business.  In 2008, he was named the CHRO for Enterprise Services Business. In 2010, Pasricha was again promoted as Sr. V-P-HR at Airtel Africa. In this capacity, he was driving HR transformation across 17 countries for Airtel Africa. At the same time, he was also the head-HR and HR business partner for nine Anglophone countries in Africa.

Pasricha began his career in HR in 1995 with the Vardhman group of companies and later joined Spice Mobile where was finally became the head of HR for the Punjab circle.

Meanwhile, Kotak Mahindra has also appointed Soumitra Acharya in the HR team to lead the investment banking division and will report to Vivek Jain, Exec Vice President and Head of HR for Corporate & Investment Banking, Private Equity, Private Wealth, ARC, Transaction Banking and Treasury, Kotak Mahindra Bank.

In his new role, Acharya will lead the HR for the Bank’s investment banking division, which comprises Mahindra Capital Company, Kotak Institutional Equities, Kotak Investment Advisors and Kotak Infrastructure Debt Funds.

Prior to this, Acharya worked as an HR business partner with Standard Chartered Bank, where he was responsible for the risk support function in India. His responsibilities included managing the entire employee lifecycle, ensuring effective talent and performance management, enabling talent mobility and succession planning, as well as effective workforce design and organisation design. He also lead employee-engagement action plans, established effective communication channels within the function, liaisoned with the global teams and specialised teams to align HR support with the functional needs, and also periodically reviewed and aligned compensation against market benchmarks.

An alumnus of XLRI, Acharya has worked with reputed organisations, such as Mahindra and Mahindra and Siemens India.