Kumar Mangalam Birla

Kumar Mangalam Birla is chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, an Indian multinational with a history of more than a hundred years that was the first Indian business group to set up abroad. He was named for the Padma Bhushan in 2023 in the field of trade and industry, from Maharashtra ^[1].

Leading the group

Birla was born on 14 June 1967 and chairs the boards of all the group’s major companies in India and overseas ^[2]. In more than 27 years at the head of the group he has raised its turnover about thirty times, to around 60 billion dollars, and led more than 40 acquisitions in India and abroad ^[2]. The group works in 36 countries, in businesses from cement, chemicals and metals to textiles, clothing and financial services, and employs about 140,000 people of more than 100 nationalities ^[2].

Boards and governance

He has served on the central board of the Reserve Bank of India and was the first industry nominee on the board of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) ^[2]. As chairman of a SEBI committee on corporate governance, he drew up the first governance code for Indian companies ^[2]. He has also served on the Prime Minister’s advisory council on trade and industry ^[2].

Education

Birla is chancellor of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, with campuses in Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad and Dubai, and has chaired IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Delhi ^[2]. In 2019 he set up a scholarship fund of 15 million pounds at the London Business School in memory of his grandfather, B. K. Birla, for ten students a year, half of them from India ^[2]. In 2021 he became the first Indian industrialist to receive TiE’s global entrepreneurship award for business transformation ^[2].