The governance rulebook is being rewritten in real time. More than 60 percent of Indian companies now view regulatory and enforcement risk as a primary business concern, a figure significantly higher than global averages. Enforcement actions that once took months now unfold in days. When a whistleblower complaint lands, boards have hours to respond before it escalates. Judicial interpretations reshape how laws apply, often with immediate commercial consequences.
These pressures form the backdrop to the Boardroom Connect, an annual series put together by ET LegalWorld, ETCFO and JSA Advocates & Solicitors to bring together chief financial officers, general counsels and key decision-makers across India’s corporate landscape for the kind of candid, experience-driven discussion that doesn’t happen in formal settings.
Boardroom Connect kicks off on 13 February in New Delhi, with two closed-door roundtables bringing together finance and legal leaders from sectors at the sharp end of regulatory change, including infrastructure, banking, healthcare, energy, real estate, manufacturing, consumer goods and private equity.
The closed-door legal leaders roundtable will focus on on how boards and senior leadership can govern risk, accountability and growth amid heightened enforcement, regulatory fragmentation and accelerating digital change. The discussion will draw on those navigating these pressures daily, including Ajay Kharbanda, Chief Legal Officer for the North and West Airport Sector at Delhi International Airport Limited; Amar Sundram, General Counsel, Senior Vice President Legal and Chief Compliance Officer at NEC Corporation India; Anamika Gupta, General Counsel and Legal Director at Eli Lilly & Co; Ashish Kumar Pandey, Head of Governance, Compliance and Company Secretary at Hero Future Energies; Dr Mukul Shastry, Group General Counsel at Cube Highways; Gagan Palta, Director and General Counsel at Max Healthcare; and Hema Sukhija, Vice President Legal at Elan Group. Also participating are Kumar Ankit, General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer at Shree Cement Limited, and Meeru Gupta, Head Legal and Vice President Legal at Bata India Limited, each bringing perspectives from infrastructure, healthcare, energy, cement and consumer-facing businesses where regulatory scrutiny is both frequent and consequential.
The discussion will further draw on insights from Mehak Oberoi, Legal Head for Hydro APAC at GE Vernova; Ojasvita Srivastava, General Counsel and Risk Manager for Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific at Securitas; Pankaj Chauhan, General Counsel and Senior Vice President Legal Affairs at Usha International; Pratibha Jain, Head of Strategy and Group General Counsel at Everstone Group; Preet Sethi, Deputy General Counsel at Vedanta Group; Ravi Rajiv Upadhyay, General Counsel at KKR; Sheel R Sinha, General Counsel and Head of Legal, Compliance and Ethics at JLL India and South Asia; and Satyajit Gupta, Vice President and Head of India Legal and Global CSR Head at EXL. The conversation will be anchored by Rupinder Malik and Trisheet Chatterjee, Partners at JSA, whose advisory work spans coverpoate governance, crisis management, investigations and complex cross-border transactions, grounding the discussion in real enforcement and boardroom experience.
The discussion will centre on how boards are navigating the widening gap between global compliance frameworks and local enforcement realities in India. As regulatory scrutiny intensifies, directors and senior executives face greater personal exposure across disclosures, data protection, ESG and whistleblower oversight. Governance models built for periodic review are being tested by real-time enforcement actions that demand rapid escalation, decisive judgment and clear accountability. At the same time, evolving trade and industrial policies, localisation norms and shifting market access rules are turning trade compliance into a board-level issue with direct implications for pricing, supply chains and long-term competitiveness.
As these pressures converge, the role of the General Counsel is being fundamentally redefined. Legal leaders are increasingly expected to act as risk and policy strategists, advising boards on enforcement trends, regulatory engagement and crisis response rather than solely on legal interpretation. The discussion will also examine crisis readiness in a zero-grace environment marked by multi-agency scrutiny, alongside emerging governance blind spots created by digitalisation, AI and automated decision-making, where accountability, transparency and risk ownership remain unresolved but increasingly regulated.
Together, these forces signal a structural change in how governance must be approached. The ETLegal JSA Boardroom Connect aims to surface practical insights from leaders confronting these issues daily, offering a timely examination of how Indian boardrooms can adapt to a world where scrutiny is constant and governance is inseparable from strategy.
More on Boardroom Connect here
