Kumar Birla appointed as IIM-A Chairman
The HRD Ministry has appointed Aditya Birla Group Chairman, Kumar Mangalam Birla, as the new Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. According to sources, Kumar Birla has received the notification from the HRD Ministry and has accepted the appointment. Other shortlisted contenders for this prestigious appointment were, Infosys chairman R Seshasayee and HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh.
In 1967, Kumar M. Birla was the fourth-generation to be born into the Birla family from Rajasthan. His childhood years were spent between Mumbai and Kolkata. Post-schooling, Birla pursued and successfully completed a Chartered Accountancy degree from India and a Business Management degree from London Business School. At age 28, he was unexpectedly thrust into the business world due to his father's untimely death.
Kumar Birla's father passed away at a relatively young age of 52. The mantle of the Aditya Birla group, then valued at $1.6 billion, was taken over by Kumar Birla. Known to be very shy and exceedingly low-profile, many senior executives at the Birla group were sceptical of his abilities to handle a mammoth organization spread over textiles, cement, aluminum and fertilizers.
His first high-profile acquisition was acquiring Reliance Industries' stake in Larsen and Toubro in 2001. In 2007, Birla group's acquisition of metals major Novelis Inc., was the second largest acquisition ever by an Indian company. Since he took over, Birla group made 37 acquisitions, the highest by any Indian business house. Under his leadership, the Birla group's revenue has jumped by a phenomenal 26-times.
Kumar Birla has been credited with expanding the Birla group to 36 countries with a massive employee force of 120,000. He is believed to have revamped the internal workings of the Birla group by replacing a system of loyalty with meritocracy. Under Mr. Birla's mandate, the Birla Group engages with 5,000 villages by funding and conceiving projects focused on health-care, education, infrastructure and social-causes.
Birla Group contributes Rs.160 crore annually to its CSR projects and Rs.40 crore is directed towards educational-ventures. The Birla Group runs 42 schools which have 42,000 students. BITS, the premier engineering college was set-up by G.D. Birla; today, Mr. Kumar Birla is the Chancellor of BITS with campuses in Pilani, Hyderabad, Goa and Dubai. In January 2016, he was appointed Chairperson of IIT Delhi.
Larsen & Toubro's Chairman, A.M. Naik, had been appointed IIM-A Chairman in 2012. However, one year into his second term, he stepped down in January 2016 citing time constraints and inability to do justice to role of IIM-A Chairman while heading L & T simultaneously.
