Introduction: The New Reality of Board Diversity Something significant is happening in boardrooms across the world. Over the past decade, board diversity and inclusion has moved from being a governance aspiration to a strategic necessity. Companies have made measurable progress in bringing more women, professionals from varied backgrounds, and diverse experiences into their boardrooms. However, recent years have also witnessed a growing debate around DEI initiatives. A global

Picture this. You're a shareholder of a listed company. The person who runs the business day to day — sets the strategy, manages the team, controls what information flows to the board — is also the person chairing the very board that is supposed to hold them accountable. Who, exactly, is watching whom? That is the heart of the CEO duality corporate governance debate. It's been running for decades. Not because the governance logic is unclear — it isn't — but because the answer

Here's a scenario that should bother anyone who takes sustainable investment seriously. Two analysts at different fund houses are both trying to evaluate the same global manufacturing company's environmental performance. They both pull ESG ratings from established, widely-used providers. One gets a score that places the company in the top tier for its sector. The other gets a score that puts the same company near the bottom. Same company. Same time period. Same stated methodo

Let me tell you something that most DEI conversations get wrong from the very first sentence. They frame DEI in leadership as something a company does for its people. A goodwill gesture. An HR initiative. Something you announce in a press release and then measure once a year in an employee satisfaction survey. That framing is the problem. Diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace are not something you do for people. It is something you build with people — and when you

Here's something that doesn't get said enough. When people talk about India AI leadership, they picture a large talent pool, cost advantages, and English-speaking engineers. That picture isn't wrong — it's just incomplete. What's actually happening is something more deliberate. India isn't just building AI. It's building AI within a framework of responsibility, enterprise pragmatism, and governance that most nations are still struggling to put together. That combination — spe

The appointment of Dr. Srinivasa Venu Uppuluri as an Independent Director of DEK & Mavericks Green Energy Limited, effective May 26, 2026, reflects a wider pattern that is reshaping governance in India’s energy and infrastructure sector — one where professionals with hands-on experience in technology, strategy, and capital deployment are increasingly being invited to take formal oversight roles at the board level. World Development Corporation's Directors' Institute formally

The appointment of Nirakar Pradhan as an Independent Director at Abakkus Investment Managers is the kind of announcement that rewards closer reading. On the surface, it is a board-level appointment at a prominent Indian asset management firm. Looked at more carefully, it is the arrival of a professional whose career represents one of the most comprehensive journeys through institutional finance that the Indian market has produced in a generation. World Development Corporation

A fund manager friend of mine once showed me two ESG rating reports on the same Indian cement company, from two different global rating agencies. One had the company near the top of its sector. The other had it near the bottom. Same company. Same quarter. Same publicly available data. "Which one do I trust?" he asked. "Neither, fully," I said. "But that's the job, isn't it?" This is the strange world ESG ratings live in. They carry huge influence — investors use them to alloc

A Boardroom Scene That Didn't Exist Three Years Ago Picture a boardroom in Dubai, late 2025. Six directors. Coffee. The agenda used to be three pages. Now it's eleven. Somewhere on page seven, between "Q3 Marketing Spend" and "New Hires," there's a line item nobody loves: Transfer Pricing Documentation Review. Three years ago, this conversation didn't happen here. UAE businesses didn't think about corporate tax because there wasn't any. You ran your numbers, you paid your VAT