[Software] NASSCOM shakeup: Accenture's Rehka Menon becomes first woman to chair Indian IT trade org.

[S9OUL.]

Indian IT trade association and advocacy group National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has appointed Rehka Menon of Accenture as chairperson – the first woman to take the position in the organisation's history.

Previously there were 18 members, two chairs, and a NASSCOM president, totalling 21, on the executive council. The new exec council has 27 members, inclusive of chairs and NASSCOM president.

Krishnan Ramanujam from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will serve as Vvice chair. He replaces the previous TCS representative, Ravi Viswanathan.

Other new members of the board hail from Fractal (Srikatnh Velamakanni), Integra (Sriram Subramanya), Firstsource (Vipul Khanna), KPMG (Akhilesh Tuteja), Mastercard (Dr Sukanyya Misra), Philips (Kalavathi GV), Cyient (Karthikeyan Natarajan), Salesforce India (Arundhati Bhattacharya), Snapdeal (Kunal Bahl), Cognizant (Rajesh Nambiar), Yellow Messenger (Raghu Ravinutala), RBS Services (Punit Sood), and Netsolutions (Sameer Jain).

Delipkumar Khandelwal remains on the board but has left SAP for Deutsche Bank. Sindhu Gangadharan now represents SAP Labs.

Dell, HP, IBM India, MindTree, NIIT Technologies, Bosch, SAP Labs, and Tech Mahindra no longer have representation.

Dell and HP's departure from the board comes about two months after servers, laptops, tablets, and all-in-one PCs were added to a list qualifying for a government incentive totalling more than $1bn. The scheme is available to new production-linked manufacturers operating or performing unspecified value-adding activities in India.