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: up for liberal real estate and housing policies both at the Central and state levels.

Parekh heads Housing Development and Finance Company (HDFC), India’s first and largest mortgage finance company, which has now grown into a large financial conglomerate. HDFC Bank was the first of nine private banks set up in the mid-1990s to showcase India’s liberalisation and economic reform.

Parekh, who trained as a chartered accountant in London and worked with Chase Manhattan Bank early in his career, has helped in a general insurance joint venture with Chubb and a tie-up with Standard Life, UK, for asset management and life insurance. He has advised various governments on high-powered, government-appointed panels to lay out the blueprint for reform in the banking, insurance and housing sectors. This has meant telling the government to take hard decisions.

Parekh is the non-nxecutive chairman of HDFC Asset Management Company Ltd, HDFC Standard Life Insurance Company Ltd and HDFC Chubb General Insurance Ltd. Before this, he has won awards like the JRD Tata Corporate Leadership Award from the All India Management Association (AIMA) and is the first recipient of the Qimpro Platinum Award for Quality for his contributions to the services sector.

Sixty-one-year-old S Ramadorai, one of the most low-profile CEOs of India’s oldest and largest software services entity, the unlisted Rs 4,187-crore Tata Consultancy Services, has won the Padma Bhusan in 2006. A Master’s in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, Ram, as he is popularly known, was the man instrumental in acquiring CMC for the House of Tatas, completing a successful and painless privatisation smoothly.

The cerebral and soft-spoken Ramadorai holds a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Delhi University and a Bachelor’s degree in engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He took the senior executive development programme at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 1993.

He was an integral part of the TCS team that pioneered the trailblazing concept of offshore development centres (ODCs), set up in India to provide high-end quality solutions to global corporations. He was at the forefront of TCS drive to establish excellence hubs in India that worked as repositories of knowledge, expertise and equipment in specialised technology areas.