(from left): HC Satish, Chief Delivery Officer, Infosys; Lakshmi Chandrasekharan, Senior Managing Director and CHRO at Accenture India; Azhagiri Selvarajan, Head of HR, Cognizant India
In a significant move to strengthen India’s position as a global technology talent hub, Nasscom has announced the formation of its new Talent Council—an industry-led initiative to build a future-ready, globally competitive digital workforce.
This is part of Nasscom’s commitment towards fostering innovation, driving digital transformation and enabling inclusive growth by building a resilient and globally-competitive workforce, the industry body said on Tuesday, as it unveiled the Council at the Nasscom People Summit in Chennai.
Nasscom also announced the appointment of HC Satish, Chief Delivery Officer, Infosys, as the Chair of the Council. With over three decades of experience in global talent strategy, innovation and digital transformation, Satish will lead the Council’s efforts.
India’s digital economy is expanding rapidly, with a projected need for nearly 30 million digitally-skilled professionals by 2026, while 50 per cent of the existing workforce will require reskilling in emerging technologies. With tech talent base exceeding 5.4 million, India is well-positioned to lead in high-impact domains such as AI, deep tech, semiconductors and cybersecurity, but this growth also calls for urgent attention to evolving skill demands, rapid technological change and the transformation of traditional workforce models in the era of GenAI, it added.
The Council will also include other prominent leaders such as Piyush Mehta, Chief Human Resources Officer and Country Manager – India at Genpact; Lakshmi Chandrasekharan, Senior Managing Director and CHRO at Accenture India; Savneet Shergill, Senior Director, Regional HR – India, Greater China and North Asia at Dell Technologies; Azhagiri Selvarajan, Head of HR, Cognizant India and Global HR Leader for Technology Services; Rajendra S Pawar, Founder of NIIT University, and Chairman and Co-founder of the NIIT Group; Richard Lobo, Chief People Officer at Tech Mahindra; and Saurabh Govil, CHRO, Wipro.
It will drive national strategy on deeptech skilling, reskilling and emerging-technology competencies, convene cross-sector collaboration across industry, academia and government, and advocate policy frameworks. The Council also aims to strengthen data-driven decision-making by enabling access to exclusive research.
Harness talent
Commenting on the Council, Satish said that this step is more than skill development; it is about transition from being talent-rich to expert talent harnessing the power of technology through application and innovating the enterprise and society around us.
Azhagiri Selvarajan, Head of HR, Cognizant India, said that a lot of students aspire to get in to STEM education because they think this is a way of uplifting themselves socially and economically. “They are learning something but by the time they come out, they are not relevant in the industry. The top most priority that we have today is not tier-2 cities but across all cities and across the workforce to help them stay relevant,” he said.
Lakshmi Chandrasekharan, Managing Director and Lead – HR, Accenture India, said that the investments that organisations are making towards technology and AI tools is three times the investment they are making in talent. “This is a problem, and an opportunity for the Council is to redirect some of the investments towards in talent,” she said.
Published on July 1, 2025
Source link
[ad_3]
[ad_4]