Industry Advisory Board

Profile

Pankaj Kalani is a business and finance leader whose nearly three-decade career spans the full arc of building, financing and steering large industrial enterprises. Uncommonly, he pairs the depth of a triple-qualified professional - Fellow Chartered Accountant, Fellow Company Secretary and meritorious Cost & Management Accountant - with the hands-on record of an operator who has run businesses in their own right, carrying full commercial and profit-and-loss responsibility rather than a purely functional finance mandate. Over his career he has led standalone businesses, launched and scaled new ventures, turned around underperforming acquisitions, and built the governance and risk architecture that allows ambitious growth to remain disciplined.

His operating experience is anchored in managing businesses independently. As Chief Executive, has been instrumental in building the business and has owned strategy, commercial terms, execution and results, end-to-end driving top and bottom-line growth through diversification, accelerated project completion and operational excellence. As Chairman of the Project Exports Promotion Council of India under the Ministry of Commerce, helped shape national policy – advocating successfully for separate project-export treatment worth an additional 2% in export benefits.

Beyond commercial and financial leadership, he is a natural institution-builder - advising boards and executive leadership on strategy, governance and ethics, and championing organisational culture, having Chaired the Happiness Council at KEC to lift the organisation's Happiness Index. Nurturing young talent has been his focus all around and as the Steering Committee member of the GMR program, actively participated in creating a very strong bench strength within the organization with focus on development programs.