Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder, chairman and group CEO of Bharti Enterprises has been elected the president, while K V Kamath, managing director & CEO, ICICI Bank, has been elected as the vice president of the Confederation of Indian Industry for the year 2007-08.
Mittal will assume office as the new president of the apex industry association on May 25. He succeeds Ashok Leyland managing direcotr R Seshasayee as the new CII President.
Bharti Enterprises, India's leading telecommunications conglomerate has been a pioneering force in sector and today enjoys a strong nationwide presence and leadership position in mobile communications (India's largest mobile service operator), fixed-line services, domestic and international long distance services and broadband services.
Mittal founded Bharti at the age of 18 after graduating from Punjab University.
Today he heads a successful enterprise, among the top 10 in India, with a market capitalisation of over $35 billion, employing over 30,000 people.
Mittal was the vice president of the CII during 2006-07 and is a member of the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry. He was the co-chairman of the World Economic Forum in 2007 and serves on several boards including the the International Advisory Board of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania, Global GSM Association, Indo-British Partnership (IBP), Singapore-India Partnership Foundation and the Boards of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.
He has been conferred the Padma Bhushan, one of highest civilian awards in India. His business acumen and leadership has been recognized through the numerous instances he has been hailed as the businessman and entrepreneur of the year by leading business & global publications and institutions.
He is Honorary Consul General of the Republic of Seychelles in New Delhi, India. He is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School, USA.
Kamath is the managing director and chief executive officer of ICICI Bank Limited, India's largest bank by market capitalisation and the second largest bank by assets.
He started his career in 1971 at ICICI, an Indian financial institution that founded ICICI Bank and merged with
it in 2002. In 1988, he moved to the Asian Development Bank and spent several years in South-East Asia before returning to ICICI as its CEO in 1996.
Over the next few years, the ICICI Group transformed itself into a diversified, technology-driven financial services group, that includes India's leading retail credit provider as well the leading private sector insurance and asset management companies.
Kamath has been conferred with an honorary PhD by the Banaras Hindu University. He is a member of the National Council of the Confederation of Indian Industry, the Board of Directors of Visa International (Asia-Pacific) and the governing boards of several leading educational institutions.
Kamath has a degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in business administration from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
