Chaiman of the Board, Manipal Global Education Services Pvt. Ltd.
Mohandas Pai is the Chairman of the Board of Manipal Global Education Services Private Limited and Advisor to the Manipal Education and Medical Group. He is also on the Board of Ascendas Property Fund Trustee Pte Ltd. (APFT). Recently, he has co-founded AARIN Capital to invest in starts-ups in the areas of Technology, Ecommerce, Health Care and Life Science. He is based out of Bangalore, India.
Mohandas actively...
Mohandas Pai is the Chairman of the Board of Manipal Global Education Services Private Limited and Advisor to the Manipal Education and Medical Group. He is also on the Board of Ascendas Property Fund Trustee Pte Ltd. (APFT). Recently, he has co-founded AARIN Capital to invest in starts-ups in the areas of Technology, Ecommerce, Health Care and Life Science. He is based out of Bangalore, India.
Mohandas actively interfaces with key leadership at Indian Regulators to improve the business ecosystem. His areas of focus are Education, Information Technology (IT) and Human Resource Development aimed at improving the quality of education and availability of skilled human resources in the Country.
Mohandas was a Member of the Board of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and, was for many years before, a Member of SEBI’s sub-committee on Accounting Standards. He is currently the Chairman of SEBI Primary Markets Advisory Committee (PMAC). He was a Trustee of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation, the body that oversees the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), for nearly six years now. He was a Member of the Dr. Anil Kakodkar Committee on Autonomy for the IITs and the Karnataka Knowledge Commission. He is currently a Member on the Boards of IIT – Bhubaneswar and IPE, Hyderabad.
Mohandas was a Member of the Kelkar Committee, constituted by the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, to reform direct tax regulations. He was also a Member of the Non-Resident Taxation Committee, the High Powered Committee on e-Commerce and Taxation, and the Empowered Committee for setting up the Country’s Tax Information Network.
Until mid-2011, he was a Member of the Board at Infosys Limited, Bangalore (formerly Infosys Technologies Limited) where he headed Human Resources; the Infosys Leadership Institute; Education & Research; Administration; and Infrastructure & Facilities. He was also the Chairperson of the Board of Infosys BPO Limited, a leading global business process outsourcing services provider, for seven years. Additionally, the Finacle and Platform Group business units reported into him.
Mohandas joined Infosys in 1994 and was elevated to a Member of the Board in 2000. He was Infosys’s CFO from 1994 to 2006. In 2006, he voluntarily relinquished the role to lead Human Resources and Education & Research. In June 2011, Mohan stepped out of Infosys to pursue his other long-standing passion - higher education for human development.
As CFO at Infosys, he played a strategic role in transforming the Company into one of the worlds most respected and well known software services companies. He formulated India’s first publicly articulated corporate financial policy, played a pivotal role in branding the company amongst the investor community and set new standards in transparency and disclosure across the Indian corporate sector. As CFO, he won multiple awards in Finance & Accounting. He was voted ’CFO of the Year’ in 2001 by IMA India, the very first year an Indian award was instituted. He also won the ’Best CFO in India’ award from Finance Asia in 2002, and ’Best Chief Financial Officer in India’ in the Best Managed Companies poll conducted by Asia Money in 2004 and many others. He was honored with the Kannada Rajyotsava Award for his exemplary public service. Under his supervision Infosys’s annual report won the Best Presented Annual Accounts Award from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India for 10 consecutive years as well as the award from the South Asia Federation of Accountants. He was honoured with the Karnataka Rajyotsava Award for his exemplary public service in 2009.
Mohandas was a key player in the development of the IT services industry and instituted several industry-firsts. He was instrumental in instituting India’s first employee stock option plan that enabled employees across Infosys to be part of and consequently to share in the wealth creation by the company. In India, this was the first ever employee stock option plan, which has since been widely emulated. At Infosys, he led the first listing of an India-registered company on the NASDAQ and the first sponsored secondary offering of American Depositary Shares. He was an early adopter of US Sarbanes -Oxley regulations. Infosys was among the first corporations outside of the United States to comply with this regulation, two years ahead of the deadline for implementation mandated to foreign filers.
Mohandas has a keen interest in human development through education such as illiteracy eradication through the promotion of primary education. In 2000, he along with certain other philanthropists set up the Akshaya Patra Foundation, Bangalore - a mid-day meal program for school going children. Today, the program feeds over 1.3 million children each day, a hot unlimited midday meal in 8,500 government schools across nine Indian states - Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Odisha, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi. This program aims to feed 5 million children by 2020. Mohan continues to make substantial personal contributions to the program. This initiative has become the largest mid-day meal program in the world.
He holds a BCom from St. Joseph’s College of Commerce, Bangalore and LLB from Bangalore University. He is also a Fellow Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.