Mr. Lalit Jalan

Current Position : Chief Executive Officer

Mr. Lalit Jalan is the CEO of Reliance Infrastructure Ltd, part of the Reliance ADAG Group, one of India’s largest corporate houses. He concurrently holds the post of Chairman, BSES Rajdhani & BSES Yamuna Pvt. Ltd.

From 2003 onwards, he has led the metamorphosis of a plain-vanilla distribution company (Reliance Energy) into the over Rs.23,000 crore R-Infra. Today R-Infra is India’s largest infrastructure company developing projects in several high growth areas in the infrastructure sector including power, roads, metro, cement and EPC.

Achievements

In 1995, Jalan joined RIL as the head of the polypropylene business. In less than four years, Mr. Jalan grew this venture into a Rs 6000 crore  revenue company despite having no background in the petrochemicals industry. He also served as Head of the E-business initiative for the group where he initiated practices such as e-procurement and SAP within the group. At 39, he was the youngest ever CEO at Reliance.

Mr. Jalan has served R-Infra in many notable leadership roles, including holding charge as CEO of R-Infra’s Delhi power distribution company, where he reduced power theft from 55% to 4-5%, as a part of turning around its operations. His areas of expertise include policy & planning, finance and logistics across the Infrastructure, Engineering – Procurement – Construction (EPC) and Energy sectors. 

Prior Experience  & Background

Mr. Jalan started his career at General Electric as a Strategic Planner where he got the opportunity to learn the ropes from the legendary Jack Welch at his peak. Having worked there for two years, he returned to India and started his own venture - Jalan Brothers in his hometown Kolkata. Jalan turned it into a Rs 250-crore business before acceding to his Wharton School batchmate Mr. Anil Ambani’s wish to join the Reliance Industries Limited (RIL). Jalan’s entrepreneurial experience, during which he tried almost everything from real estate, software, logistics, distribution to even cement, is over a Rs 1,000-crore business now and is looked after by his son.

Qualifications & Honours

Mr. Jalan is highly qualified. He has a Management Degree in Business Administration (MBA) in Finance from Wharton School and an MS in Computer Science from Moore School, University of Pennsylvania got it 1982. Mr. Jalan is an esteemed alumnus of IIT, Kanpur with a B Tech in 1979. Always an achiever with top positions, he was winner of the Directors Honours and Deans List at Wharton School of Business.

He has been honored with the 'Distinguished Alumni Award' from IIT, Kanpur. He was also endorsed as one of the 15 achievers from the IIT system at the 1st PAN IIT meet in California in January 2003. In January 2010, he was selected to the prestigious ‘IITK @ 50’ at the Golden Jubilee Alumni Convention of IIT  Kanpur, which honored its top 50 alumni in the last 50 years who had excelled and had a lasting impact in their areas of work. He is recognized as one of the ''100 Most Powerful CEO’s'' by the Economic Times in 2009. He was recently recognized as the Leading Energy Personality at the 6th India Power Awards held by the Council of Power Utilities in 2013.

Personal Information

Mr. Jalan resides in Mumbai with his family which includes his parents, wife Anita who is a fashion designer and two sons, who are also Wharton graduates.