The best chief executive officers of companies have been produced by higher education in India, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, amid a number of CEOs of Indian origin are being recruited by global companies. Acknowledging the conductive ecosystem of India, Sitharaman said that the number of Indian CEOs is just next to the that from the United States as per the S&P (Standard and Poor’s) top 500 companies list.
“Globally, I might be saying something which all of you might be already aware of, 58 top-notch company CEOs are Indian in origin. They are in 11 such companies which are multinational firms,” Sitharaman said while addressing the address convocation event of Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing at Kancheepuram, on Saturday.
“These firms have a collective revenue of 1 trillion while 4 trillion in turnover,” the finance minister said, while also pointing out, “Fifty-eight India educated CEOs are managing this scale of corporate sizes. But that does not mean that we don’t have to work on our education system. We have to keep up the system to continue such feats. We are at a juncture to take India in a leap-frogging sense.”
The finance minister further said in her address that India forms the second-largest contingent of the chiefs who manage global firms, and is only positioned behind the US. “Lift your collars with pride, 25 per cent of Silicon Valley startups are managed by Indians”.
India’s working population will overtake China in 2028, Sitharaman said citing UN population data from 2019. “That working age population will reach the level of 65 per cent – of entire population – by 2036 and it stay at the level till 2047,”
The finance minister further stated that this will also help in the growth of the GDP of India. “It is only when they are skilled, only when they are trained and given equal opportunities – irrespective of gender and class – that they would be able to contribute to the growth of the country. This brings forth the importance of training them today.”
Last week, Devika Bulchandani was appointed as the CEO of ad agency Ogilvy, while a week prior to that, Laxman Narasimhan was named the CEO of coffee giant Starbucks. Other prominent CEOs of Indian origin helming global companies include Alphabet’s Sunchar Pichai, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Parag Agrawal who heads Twitter and Leena Nair of Chanel.
On Friday, Sitharaman said India becoming the fifth largest economy from 11th in a decade is not a “mean achievement” and the people of India should take credit for it, at another event in New Delhi. The finance minister further said that during these 10 years, there was an outbreak of COVID pandemic and everything came to a grinding halt.
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