ET Awards for Corporate Excellence: Unicorn rider, leading bank, top envoy, key minister bag top honours

MUMBAI: The founder of a unicorn, one of India’s leading banks, the country’s top diplomat, and a minister who has energised road-building — all winners at the Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence on Friday. A special seven-member jury deliberated for two-and-a-half hours and declared the selections after possibly the longest-ever such session in the Awards history.

Kotak Mahindra Bank, founded by Uday Kotak, was declared Company of the Year. N Chandrasekaran, managing director of Tata Consultancy Services, won Business Leader of the Year. Nitin Gadkari, union minister of roads, was declared Business Reformer of the Year.

IndiGo won Emerging Company of the Year after much debate while KV Kamath, former chairman of ICICI Bank, won the Lifetime Achievement Award. Other winners included S Jaishankar, India’s foreign secretary, who was declared Policy Change Agent of the Year. The TVS Foundation of TVS Group was named Corporate Citizen of the Year and Sundar Pichai of Google won the Global Indian of the Year award.

The jury members participated in intense discussions on many of the nominees with the aim of picking the best candidate. “The route taken this time to name the toppers was unusual. While we parleyed intensely and in each instance went into the nub of their achievements, what followed was a secret ballot,” said jury member Kumar Birla.

The jury called for outside names when it came to deciding Emerging Company of the Year as they wanted to expand the field. Financial services firm IIFL Holdings, run by Nirmal Jain, Page Industries and IndiGo were then added to the field of five nominees in that category.

IndiGo won due to its strong business model, service quality and the impact it has made on the aviation industry. Gadkari sailed through in a near-unanimous vote while another intense discussion over the Policy Change Agent category produced a winner in Jaishankar.

Jury members credited him with improving India’s image and bargaining power and the intense diplomatic activity that resulted in most South Asian countries siding with India over the cancellation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summit in Islamabad over the terrorist attacks emanating from Pakistan.

Kotak Mahindra Bank and IndusInd Bank were engaged in a nailbiting race to the finish with the first pipping the Ramesh Sobtirun IndusInd on the basis of scale and ability to deliver consistent performance.

Uday Kotak, who was one of the jury members, stepped out of the meeting room during deliberations in this category, and so did Anand Mahindra, chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm won Entrepreneur of the Year as the jury deliberated between him and Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola Cabs. Sharma recused himself during the debate over this category. The jury did not need much time to decide the Global Indian of the Year in favour of Pichai.

The jury members were Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, Uday Kotak, Anand Mahindra, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Sachin Bansal, executive chairman of Flipkart, Chanda Kochhar, MD of ICICI Bank, and Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries.

Kochhar was unanimously chosen the chairman by the jury members. Bharti Group Chairman Sunil Mittal was unable to attend the jury meeting due to a last-minute emergency.

“The irony is, as one of the members said, you were absent for 40% of this deliberation, so I am the invisible man on the jury,” said Mahindra.