Meet the speakers behind charcha 2025




Pankaj is an entrepreneur and investor who champions the power of work capital—deploying capital to give meaning and access to work.He is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Caret Capital, an early-stage sustainability-focused venture capital fund, and the Co-Founder of Taggd, the preferred recruitmentpartner of India Inc.He has successfully led the exits of PeopleStrong (to Goldman Sachs) and Wheebox (to ETS, creators of TOEFL, GRE, and TOEIC). Pankaj serves as the Founder Trustee of YouinYou, a non-profit dedicated to educating underprivileged children and contributes to national capacity-building as a board member of the KarmYogi Bharat mission and a member of the Government of India’s high-powered exam reform committee.He also advises leading education and business institutions, including Masters’ Union and Sunstone Eduversity, and was recently conferred an honorary PhD for his contributions to entrepreneurship and job creation. Pankaj is a seeker at heart, driven by a passion to decode ancient Indian wisdom and distill it into practical life tools for modern living.














Pooja Nanda leads the Women’s Economic Empowerment vertical at the Mahindra Group – Kaabil - a flagship initiative aiming to enable one million women to enter the workforce through skill development, digital access, and job placement. With nearly three decades of global experience across financial services, operations and technology—including global leadership roles at Mastercard, Credit Suisse, Citi, and Thomson Reuters—she brings deep expertise in execution, strategy, stakeholder engagement, and program leadership.
After 28+ years in global roles, Pooja’s transition to India and into the social impact sector reflects her commitment to using business as a force for good. Pooja is also serving as a Managing Trustee of Adhata Trust, in her personal capacity, which is a family run trust supporting dignified aging and senior citizen welfare programs, including community centers, an assisted living home, and a geriatric hospital for underserved populations, and scaling to support children and women.
An INSEAD MBA graduate, Pooja is known for building high-performing diverse, global teams and delivering results across continents. Her career reflects a strong dedication to inclusive growth, systems change, and sustainable development. She is also the Co-Chair and active volunteer for the INSEAD Alumni network in Mumbai.














Prakash is a Senior Manager at the Nudge Institute, where he heads the Impact team for the Economic Inclusion Programme. Over the past four years, he has spearheaded multiple impact and process evaluations across diverse geographies while strengthening monitoring and quality measurement frameworks.
He has over 12 years of experience in the social development sector. He began his career implementing programs at the grassroots level, focusing on energy access, water security, and livelihood. He has since gravitated towards monitoring and evaluation.
Prakash holds a Master's degree in Renewable Energy Engineering and Physics












Pranav is a Project Leader at BCG in the Public Sector & Social Impact practice, with over a decade of experience shaping transformative models across digital agriculture, cooperative finance, and rural development. His work integrates policy innovation, technology adoption, and AI-enabled delivery to drive inclusive economic growth across India’s rural and agri ecosystems.
He has led strategy and implementation for India’s largest agriculture-focused development finance institution (DFI), anchoring national initiatives on PACS computerization, digital cooperative enablement, and financial inclusion. Pranav has pioneered breakthrough solutions such as an AI- and remote sensing-based alternative credit scoring model for shrimp farmers in Andhra Pradesh, and India’s first Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) purpose-bound lending framework for tenant farmers—advancing precision credit and traceable fund utilization.
His portfolio includes designing a shared digital services platform for rural cooperative banks to enable scale efficiencies, data integration, and AI-led monitoring; establishing a GenAI Centre of Excellence for a leading DFI to embed AI across governance, operations, and portfolio management; and contributing to India’s national digital rural transformation strategy, shaping scalable models for farmer collectives, agribusiness ecosystems, and blended finance partnerships.
He has completed the Climate & Sustainability Stewardship Program from Nanyang Technological University, holds a Post Graduate Program in Management (Finance & Strategy) from the Indian School of Business, and earned a B.E. (Hons.) in Mechanical Engineering along with an M.Sc. (Hons.) in Economics from BITS Pilani.














Prarthana Prateek Kaul is a prominent figure in the field of disability inclusion and social entrepreneurship. As the Co-Founder of GiftAbled, she has spearheaded initiatives to create an inclusive society by supporting the livelihood of thousands of People with Disabilities and the underprivileged across India. Prior to GiftAbled, she gained valuable experience at IBM and iVolunteer.
Known for her dynamic energy and expertise, Prarthana is a sought-after motivational speaker and consultant on disability inclusion, having worked with numerous multinational organizations to foster diversity and inclusion within their ranks. She has conducted extensive workshops and training sessions on topics such as sign language, Braille, volunteer management, and employee engagement.
Her impact extends beyond workshops; Prarthana has engaged with over 25,000+ volunteers and hundreds of non-profits, making significant contributions to various causes. She has been invited to prestigious institutions like IIT Chennai, ISDM, TISS Mumbai, and IIM Bangalore to share her insights on inclusion and volunteering.
Her efforts and contribution towards the empowerment of People with Disabilities, has won her various awards and accolades, including: Social Entrepreneur of the Year by Namma Bengaluru Foundation (2015), Community Service Award by Rotary Bangalore Centennial (2017), Best Social Entrepreneur Award by Hand in Hand (2018), Top 3 social enterprise in the country by IIM Calcutta Innovation Park as part of Tata Social Enterprise Challenge (2019), Social Innovation Leadership Award at National CSR Leadership Congress & Award by World CSR Day, World CSR Congress, CMO Asia and World Women Leadership Congress (2021 & 2023), Excellence In Social Service Award by Karnataka Women Achievers Award (2024). She has also served on the board of non-profit entities and contributed as a life skills trainer for students in need.
Prarthana has led workshops for numerous corporate giants such as Accenture, All State, Akamai Technologies, Capgemini, Cisco, Fujitsu, Google, GE, IBM, Intel, Intuit, LinkedIn, McAfee, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, Publicis Sapient, Shell, UBS, Visa, Vijaya Bank, Walmart to name a few, helping them embrace diversity and promote inclusion within their organizations.













Prasanna Arunachalam is the Chief Product Officer at Meesho, where he drives the company’s product strategy and innovation to advance its mission of democratizing internet commerce in India. Over his nearly five-year tenure at Meesho, he has played a pivotal role in building and scaling key business verticals, previously leading monetisation and content commerce.
With extensive experience in product leadership, Prasanna brings a strong blend of strategic thinking, customer-centric design, and a deep understanding of India’s rapidly evolving digital commerce ecosystem. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore and continues to shape Meesho’s vision of making online commerce accessible to every Indian entrepreneur.










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Prashast is the Co-founder and Director at Saajha, a not-for-profit improving learning outcomes in government schools. He has led the development of data-driven and tech-enabled systems that enable scale across public education networks. With prior leadership experience in business excellence, supply chain, and data systems at organizations like Dharma Life, he brings strong analytical and technical expertise. An engineer from BITS Pilani and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, he focuses on scalable, data-led social impact.














Prateek Agarwal is an accomplished leader with 15+ years of experience spanning technology, education, and social impact. Currently, he leads Education initiatives for Amazon Community Impact in India including Amazon Future Engineer program, focusing on increasing access to computer science education and career opportunities for underserved students. Under his leadership, the Amazon Future Engineer program has scaled significantly, reaching millions of students through strategic partnerships with state governments and nonprofits.
Before his current role, Prateek managed social impact programs at AWS and Meta, focusing on health and skill development initiatives. His experience includes leading the AWS re/Start program, which provided cloud computing skills and job placement support to unemployed and underemployed individuals. Earlier in his career, as a marketing leader at the National Skill Development Corporation, he spearheaded behavioral change campaigns that inspired millions of young people to pursue vocational training as a mainstream career option.
A marketeer at heart, Prateek combines his passion for social impact with strategic program development and implementation skills to create sustainable change. His work consistently focuses on bridging opportunity gaps and enabling underserved communities to access quality education and career pathways in technology.












There’s a lot happening at charcha 2025
Exciting programming in play - marquee speakers, extensive CSR and CSO network participation, thought-provoking panels and workshops, curated networking, and more.

