Dr. Nidhi Pundhir is an international humanitarian services and socio-economic-environmental development specialist. She leads the global CSR agenda for HCLTech and heads HCLFoundation, which is the CSR arm of HCLTech, in India.
Dr. Pundhir has strategized as well as executed impactful programmatic frameworks that are aligned to the global Sustainable Development Goals, for the most disadvantaged and isolated communities, including environmental targets. She has a deep understanding of poverty issues and delivers realistic approaches towards poverty alleviation. In her current role, Nidhi has envisioned HCLTech’s flagship Global CSR Policy which pioneers around 10 commandments of CSR. She has built the HCLFoundation’s vision, mission, and strategy to the next level, ensuring high quality programme delivery, that brings about meaningful difference on ground.
With more than 25 years of experience in actualizing Human Rights and Environmental action at national and international levels, some of the key portfolios she has held were with SOS Children’s Villages as Director Programme Development, Asia, and at Plan International’s International Headquarters as Global Advisor on Child Protection in Development.
Dr. Pundhir holds a doctorate in Public Health Management, with her thesis on “Right to Health During First 1000 Days of Life for Children Living in Slums”, from IIHMR University, Jaipur and M.Phil. in Health Systems Management from BITS, Pilani, India.
In her pursuit and passion towards social development, Nidhi has travelled to almost 40 countries and most of her home country, India. She is a big fan of culture and classical arts, and holds an equivalent bachelor’s degree in Indian classical dance – Kathak, from Gandharv Mahavidyalaya.
She lives in NOIDA, India, with her two sons and husband.
Alok Varma is the Director of Samuday & My Clean City. Having played a key role in the conceptualization and creation of Samuday, he oversees the strategy and management of the program. Alok started his career as a civil servant in the state of Uttar Pradesh and holds a post-graduate diploma in Management from IIM, Lucknow. He has also worked as a consultant on various infrastructure and development projects for several state and international governments and institutions.
Simi Suri is the founding member of HCLFoundation. She has played a key role in setting up the CSR initiatives of HCL and is currently spearheading Power of One, the corporate volunteering and payroll giving program at HCL which has enabled over 40,000 employees to engage in humanitarian and development activities. Simi has over 15 years of experience in the development sector through her stint in the NASSCOM, UNICEF and now, in HCL. She is involved extensively in administration and financial management, strategic planning, capacity building and partnership development. Her key strength is her ability to enable and motivate people to bring out the best in them.
Dr. Santanu Basu has over 15 years of experience across a broad range of climate change mitigation efforts involving Natural Resource Management, forestry and biodiversity conservation & management using various GIS and Remote sensing tools and techniques. Over the years, he has executed projects related to forest carbon inventory, forest monitoring system, REDD+ project development, community based forest management and ground based sampling. Along with forestry, he has also been associated with biodiversity conservation and management projects. Santanu has also worked for identification and monitoring of forest connectivity and corridors, for flagship species such as tigers and elephants in various states of India. He has led and supervised teams for conducting tasks such as forest carbon inventory, biodiversity monitoring & management and RS & GIS analysis to ascertain carbon stock estimation and mapping, forest cover assessment, monitoring and evaluation of forest quality, assessment of land cover vulnerability to deforestation and forest degradation and maintaining non-spatial database for project planning, implementation and monitoring.