Thiru A Thirunavukkarasu joins Cadila as global president – HR

Cadila has appointed Thiru A Thirunavukkarasu as the global president for HR. Backed by more than three decades of experience in the field of human resources, he will now be in charge of leading the people function at a global level for the Company.

A few months ago, Sunil Singh, CHRO, Cadila, had moved on to start his own consultancy.

Thirunavukkarasu completed his masters in social work (MSW) in personnel management and organisational behaviour, from Loyola College, Chennai and went on to teach organisational behaviour and personnel management at the College as assistant professor for a year right afterwards.

He joined Areva, the French multinational, post his year-long teaching stint at Loyola and stayed there for four years. He joined as a management trainee and was elevated to the post of personnel officer. After leaving Areva, he did a couple of short stints in the next four years at Wimco and Well Knit Apparels before joining Hindustan Unilever in 1993.

At Unilever, he stayed for nine years and was elevated to the position of regional HR head in the Company. Unilever was his longest stint yet and he stayed there till 2002. Post Unilever, he joined TVS Electronics as the head of employee relations for a year before moving on to the Vedanta Group in 2004.

He joined the Vedanta Group as the head of HR for Sterlite Industries and was elevated over time to vice president of HR, heading the copper business. In 2007, he took over as the head of corporate HR in the Company and became a member of the group executive committee.

From Vedanta, he moved on to JK as the president of corporate HR, for a period of three years. In between, for one year, he worked as a management consultant, HR and IR, and was also a visiting professor at SBU Pune, before taking up this latest assignment as the global lead for HR at Cadila.

Thirunavukkarasu’s key strengths are his his strong domain knowledge born out of his extensive work in the field as a professional, coupled with articulate and out-of-the-box thinking, as praised by TVRL’s 360 feedback in 2016.

He also visits premier engineering and management schools including IIMs, IITs, NMIMS, SPJIMR and Delhi School of Economics besides participting in panel discussions at national level HR summits.