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Family Office Excellence Awards

India Sotheby’s International Realty, in partnership with CNBC TV18 and Grant Thornton Bharat, proudly presents the Family Office Excellence Awards 2024. These awards honour pioneers and innovators amongst India's family offices. We celebrate trailblazers, spotlight best practices, and highlight achievements to inspire entrepreneurial families nationwide. We also celebrate individuals who excel in wealth creation while making a difference, to build legacies for generations.

abouttheawards

About the awards

eligibility and methodology

Eligibility

Methodology

eligibility

Pavitra Shankar

Pavitra Shankar is the Managing Director at Brigade Enterprises Limited. She has over 18 years of experience in consulting, private equity and real estate development. At Brigade, she is responsible for Brigade's residential business strategy and growth, with a strong focus on customer experience and data analytics. Pavitra also leads the company's digital transformation and drives the Group’s ESG journey towards achieving Net Zero emissions by 2045. Before joining Brigade, Pavitra founded and ran Legion Real Estate in Menlo Park, California, which provided business development and real estate marketing consultancy to Indian developers targeting the NRI market in North America. Prior to that Pavitra was responsible for portfolio analytics and fund operations at Rockwood Capital LLC in San Francisco, a real estate private equity firm with over $8 billion in assets under management through commingled funds and separate accounts. She was also with Willis Towers Watson, a human capital consulting firm, in their Actuarial Consulting and Corporate Finance teams. Pavitra holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Virginia and a Master's in Business Administration in Real Estate and Finance from Columbia Business School, where she received the prestigious Alexander Bodini Real Estate Fellowship. Pavitra is a Trustee of the Indian Music Experience, Bangalore, a monumental and philanthropic initiative by Brigade that is India’s only hi-tech interactive music museum. She is an industry thought leader and is carving a niche for herself as one of the few female leaders in the construction and real estate industry. Pavitra was named ‘Realty Person of the Year’ at the Economic Times Real Estate Awards 2024 and received the 'Woman Achiever in the Real Estate Sector' award at the Ace Alpha Awards 2023. She was also in the 40 under 40 icons list by Realty Plus in 2021. 

Managing Director, Brigade Enterprises Limited

Ajay Bahl

Ajay Bahl is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of AZB & Partners. In addition to being a lawyer, he is a qualified Chartered Accountant. 

Ajay has over 35 years of experience and advises corporates (domestic and international) in a wide area of advisory, transactional, litigation and compliance needs. This includes regulatory compliant and tax-efficient India entry and operating models and cross border investment. He mentors the extensive tax practice at AZB & Partners and has been involved in various tax matters concerning cross border transactions, transfer pricing issues, etc. 

Ajay advises companies, promoters, Boards and audit firms on corporate governance, regulatory compliance, group restructuring, investigations pertaining to corruption and bribery, accounting fraud, etc., competition & anti-trust, succession planning and other issues. He has served as an independent expert on behalf of the Government of India on accounting and tax issues before the International Court of Justice. 

Ajay has served and currently serves as an expert member on various committees, including the Eshwar Committee on reform of direct taxes, the Company Law Committee for amending and decriminalising the law, the Expert Committee for drafting legal framework for allowing VCC structure in the IFSCs, the Government-CII Task Force on Ease of Doing Business’, among others. He serves as the Co-Chair of the Task Force on Integrity & Compliance formed by CII B20 India Secretariat to represent the Indian Industry towards the discussions throughout the Brazilian Presidency of B20. He is also the Chairman of the CII Task Force on Judicial Reforms. 

Ajay is widely recognized as one of India’s foremost corporate attorneys. He has been lauded by Chambers Asia–Pacific for his “sharp commercial mind and ability to lead from the front.”

Co-Founder and Managing Partner, AZB & Partners

Dr Rajiv Kumar

Dr. Rajiv Kumar is the Chairman of Pahle India Foundation, a non-profit research think tank, which he founded in 2013. He is the former Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog. He is currently Member of the Global Leadership Council, GASP, New York. He also served as the Chancellor of Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow. 

He has a wide experience working in academia, government, industry as well as in multilateral institutions. He started his academic career at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) as a Researcher during 1977-1982. He later became the Director & CEO of ICRIER between 2006 and 2011. He was a Professor at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), Delhi. 

In the government, he was Economic Advisor with the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA), Ministry of Finance (1991-1995) and Senior Consultant at the Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices (BICP), Ministry of Industry (1989-1991). 

His experience in multilateral financial institutions was with the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila, where he spent 10 years before returning to India in 2004. He was also the Chief Economist of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) during 2004-2006 and Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) during 2011-2013. 

He served on the Central Boards of State Bank of India for two terms and was also on the Central Board of Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Dr. Kumar has a Ph.D in Economics from Lucknow University and a D.Phil from Oxford University.

Chairman, Pahle India Foundation

Kunal Bahl

Kunal Bahl is a technology entrepreneur and investor.

He is the co-founder of Titan Capital, through which he has invested in more than 250 start-ups over 12 years across various sectors and geographies in consumer tech, health tech, fin-tech, SaaS, consumer brands, and B2B platforms in companies like Ola, Urban Company, Razorpay, OfBusiness, Mamaearth, Credgenics among others.

He is the co-founder of Snapdeal, one of India’s leading e-commerce platforms. Founded in 2010, Snapdeal focuses on the value commerce market in India and has served over 100 million online shoppers over the last 14+ years.

He is also the promoter of Unicommerce eSolutions Limited, India's leading e-commerce enablement SaaS company, which is listed on the NSE and BSE.

Kunal is an influential voice on issues pertaining to Indian start-ups and entrepreneurship. He is a member of India’s National Startup Advisory Council. As Chairman of CII's National Startup Council (2023-24), (2024-25), he leads efforts to forge closer ties between the start-up & investor ecosystems in India and the Middle East. He is also anchoring CII efforts to define corporate governance best practices for Indian start-ups. Kunal was
part of Nasscom’s Executive Council (2019-2023). He is also the former chairman of CII’s E-Commerce Council.

Kunal is a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) and an Independent Director on the board of Piramal Enterprises Limited.

He graduated from the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania and holds degrees in engineering and business from the Wharton School.

Co-Founder, Titan Capital

Manisha Girotra

Manisha Girotra is the Chief Executive Officer of Moelis in India. She was previously Chairperson and Country Head for UBS in India. 

With a career spanning 30 years with UBS in London, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Delhi and with Moelis, she has bootstrapped both these organisations in India, setting up the teams, obtaining necessary regulatory licenses, building the brand, the corporate governance and the business model. She was the youngest CEO of a global investment bank in India at the age of 32. 

Manisha has advised over US $500 Billion of mergers and acquisitions and equity and debt fundraisings through her career. Some landmark transactions include Vodafone’s US $12 Billion acquisition of Hutch’s telecom business, Bharti Airtel’s US $10 Billion acquisition of Zain Africa, US $65 Billion merger of HDFC-HDFC Bank, Birla Group’s US $6 Billion acquisition of Novelis. 

Manisha is on the Global Board of Naspers and Prosus, Ashok Leyland, Mindspace Business Parks REIT and Sona Comstar. She is on the Boards of Central Square Foundation and Neurology Foundation. She is a mentor for working women and aspiring working women at the start-up, ‘Aspire For Her’. She represents the banking industry’s viewpoint on panels of SEBI, CII, FICCI and other associations. Her contributions have been widely recognised through accolades by being named as one of the ‘50 Women to Watch’ by The Wall Street Journal, ‘Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Business in India’ by Business Today and being nominated in the ‘Top 50 Women in Business’ by Forbes & Fortune. 

Manisha graduated in Economics from St Stephen's College, Delhi and was awarded the Dr. Manmohan Singh Gold Medal for academic excellence for her Master’s Degree from the Delhi School of Economics.

About the awards

Eligibility

Methodology

Award Categories

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