People & Partners

Chief Operating Officer, Head - InSight

Amit Gupta

Amit Gupta is COO of the The/Nudge Institute. In this role, he is responsible for various horizontal functions such as finance, strategy, people & culture, impact and technology. Amit has over two decades of global experience in strategy, transformation and business finance. He has successfully led execution of many high-stakes business growth and turnaround initiatives for companies operating at the cutting edge of technology. He has worked in a diverse set of business contexts – be it an early stage start-up, or a high-growth scale-up company, or a Fortune 500 industry leader, or management consultancy firms. Amit is an alumnus of IIT, Roorkee and the University of Texas at Austin.

Founder & CEO

Atul Satija

Atul Satija is the Founder & CEO of The/Nudge Institute. After 17 years of starting, scaling and turning around various businesses in some of the largest and most respected organisations globally, he decided to start The/Nudge Institute to fulfill his passion of working on inequality and social issues facing India. Previously at his 5-year stint at InMobi, Atul helped scale the organisation from a small start-up to a global leader in mobile advertising. Prior to InMobi, Atul was the Head of Mobile Business for Japan & Asia-Pacific, and Head of Business Development for India at Google. Atul has also done various sales, consulting and business development assignments across telecom and technology companies including Adobe, Samsung and Infosys.

Head, Social Entrepreneurship

Gayathri Swahar

Dr. Gayathri Swahar is a seasoned leader in food technology and consumer behavior, currently serving as Senior Director at The/Nudge Institute, where she leads the Social Entrepreneurship vertical. She is the co-founder of YCook India, an award-winning food tech company recognized globally among the top 20 most innovative food companies and the only one from Asia. Under her leadership, YCook pioneered technology that extends the shelf life of fresh produce up to one year without preservatives or refrigeration.

With over a decade of experience at Nielsen, Dr. Swahar held various leadership roles, including heading the Consumer Neuroscience practice in India and securing patents in consumer research. She was also an Indian Administrative Fellow, supporting strategic government initiatives in the Horticulture Department, for which she was awarded by the Governor of Karnataka.

Dr. Swahar’s contributions have been featured in a UN-supported coffee table book celebrating 75 inspiring women from India.

Head, Refarm

Gitanjali Rajamani

Gitanjali Rajamani heads a Direct Implementation program in Agriculture at The/Nudge Institute. She is passionate about climate resilient regenerative agriculture and is working on solutions that would yield a sustainable income increase for small and marginal farmers at scale. Gitanjali is a 2X Entrepreneur having founded Farmizen, which is a farm to fork marketplace for Organic produce and GreenMyLife which is into creating sustainable landscapes. Gitanjali comes with 22+ years of work experience and has previously worked with corporates such as TCS, leading large-scale operations for Big Pharma clients GSK, Astra Zeneca, JnJ for their Clinical Research services. Gitanjali has a Masters in International Management and is an alum of the Indian School of Business’ Goldman Sachs 10000 program and the Ambassador program. She was also the winner of the Goldman Sachs and Fortune Global Women Leader award for the year 2018.

Head, Forum

Jerold Pereira

Jerold is a finance professional with 20+ years of experience in launching and scaling operations in sectors such as retail, consumer electronics, real estate and hospitality. He has worked in leadership roles with Indian business groups such as Tata, Piramal, DLF and Videocon before joining a B2B tech-first, scale-up that enables enterprises and education to engage and optimize their workforce and student bodies, respectively. Within The/Nudge Institute, Jerold leads The/Nudge Forum, a platform that helps accelerate problem solving by bringing together stakeholders for collective thought and action for large-scale social change.

Head, Livelihood Programs

John Paul

John leads Economic Inclusion Program and Asha Kiran at The/Nudge Institute’s Centre for Rural Development. He was previously Head of Product & Innovation for The/Nudge’s Centre for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship building employability programs for underprivileged youth. Before The/Nudge, he has worked in consulting, healthcare and FMCG with organizations such as Frost & Sullivan and Reckitt Benckiser. John is an alumnus of BITS, Pilani and the Indian School of Business (ISB).

Head, Prize

Kanishka Chatterjee

Kanishka leads The/Nudge Prize – A social innovation initiative that bring urgency & scale to stagnant livelihood issues, by inducing for tech-first solutions through grand challenges. Before joining The/Nudge Institute, he spent 16 years in consumer marketing & digital analytics as a consulting and commercial analytics leader. He has worked across Pharma, CPG & BFSI, focused on growth-hacking digital marketing strategy and driving differentiated research & social media insights practices for CXOs/enterprises. He’s worked with Genpact, Clarivate, Axtria and led the marketing analytics portfolio and established new practices in digital transformations. Kanishka has a Bachelor’s in Economics and PGDBM in Marketing from TAPMI, Manipal. He’s also a post graduate public policy student at the Takshashila Institute.

Chief People Officer

Krishna Raghavan 

Krishna Raghavan is Chief People Officer, The/Nudge Institute. His focus is on crafting and implementing a people and culture strategy that enables every Nudgester to live the Nudge Spirit in the pursuit of the organisation’s mission.

With 25 years of experience across Tech and HR, Krishna has served as Chief People Officer at Flipkart, where he spearheaded transformative initiatives that significantly enhanced the employee experience and positioned the company as an employer of choice.

Previously, Krishna has worked with Navi, Cleartrip and Yahoo. In his HR roles, he has led talent acquisition and development, compensation and benefits, organisational design, employee engagement, and diversity and inclusion. Krishna holds a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from St. Xavier’s College and a B.S, Mathematics, Computer Science from Denison University. 

Chief Financial Officer

Sachin Mardikar

Sachin Mardikar is the CFO of the The/Nudge Institute. In his role he leads the Finance, Compliance and Accounts function.  Sachin started his professional journey with two of India’s most respected institutions — the Tata Group and Deloitte in the core areas of finance and compliance. These early years shaped his path over the next decades, working at the intersection of philanthropy, livelihoods, social impact finance and CSR. In his previous engagement as the CFO at the Reliance Foundation, he oversaw finance and compliance functions. . He is passionate about working with purpose-led organizations that leverage finance and technology to address urgent challenges like climate change, healthcare, environment, and skills. Sachin is a Chartered Accountant (CA) and Cost and Management Accountant (CMA).

Head, Fundraising & Partnerships

Sriram Venkatraman

With 18 years of experience across the corporate and development sector, Sriram leads global partnerships and fundraising at The/Nudge, and has been a member of The/Nudge’s leadership team since its inception in 2015. At The/Nudge, he has led community mobilization for skilling programs, fundraising from foundations, corporates and government besides contributing to the organization’s overall strategy, operations, people practices and culture. Prior to The/Nudge, Sriram led public mobilization and individual fundraising at Amnesty International India after having spent 8 years in healthcare consulting. Sriram, along with his partner, is a signatory of a giving pledge – “Living My Promise” and is an engineer from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.

Head, Livelihoods Ecosystem

Subhashree Dutta

Subhashree Dutta is the Managing Partner, Social Entrepreneurship at The/Nudge. Subhashree has 30 years’ investing experience in the Asian credit markets across the broad spectrum of credit strategies. She worked with Fiera Capital (Asia) (formerly Clearwater Capital Partners) for about 20 years and her last assignment was as CEO of its Singapore office. She was a member of the Firm’s Investment and Management Committees. She started her career with ICICI Bank in India. Subhashree has a PGDM from IIM Calcutta and is a CFA® charterholder.

Head, Marketing

Vaibhav Budhraja

Vaibhav is the Director and Head, Marketing at the Nudge Institute. In 15 years of his professional journey across diverse organizations (IBM, PepsiCo and HCL Corp.) and sectors(IT, FMCG and Education), he has had the opportunity to create impact in roles spanning Strategy, Marketing and Business Development. Vaibhav has done his Masters in Business Management from IIM Lucknow and Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from IIT, (ISM) Dhanbad.

Head, Indian Administrative Fellowship

Vivek Sharma

Vivek leads the “Indian Administrative Fellowship” program at The/Nudge. He has over 30 years of experience in Sustainable Development, Financial Management, Business Strategy, ESG and Social Impact Fund. He is an MBA from IIM-Calcutta, a Civil Engineering graduate from IIT–Roorkee and a Fellow of Institution of Engineers (India). He has worked in the Public and Private sector both. He started his career with “Indian Engineering Services” and then moved to the corporate sector wherein he worked at CXO level across companies like Shriram Group, Thermax and Mahindra & Mahindra.