Celebrating excellence in telecom leadership

Voice&Data shines a spotlight on the trailblazers and visionaries shaping India’s telecom landscape with the Telecom Leadership Awards 2023.

V&D Bureau

As India’s leading and the first telecom industry magazine, Voice&Data has been chronicling the journey of the telecom ecosystem in India since the first telecom policy was announced to open up the sector. The publication has been an industry voice, actively highlighting its achievements, underlining the challenges and advocating for policy updates and changes, playing an independent role of the fourth pillar to drive and influence factors of growth. The CyberMedia Group publication has also been motivating the industry to do more, better and innovate by recognising the leaders and trailblazers.

Keeping up with its tradition, the magazine hosted the 23rd Telecom Leadership Forum (TLF), including the V&D Telecom Leadership Award for 2023. The Telecom Person of the Awards for 2023 was conferred upon K Rajaraman, Chairman of the International Financial Services Centres Authority for his role as the former Telecom Secretary for creating a conducive environment to drive the telecom sector.

The Pathbreaker of the Year was given jointly to Dr Neeraj Mittal, Chairman – DCC and Secretary – Department of Telecommunications (on behalf of the DoT), Mathew Oommen, President of Reliance Jio, and Gopal Vittal, Managing Director & CEO of Bharti Airtel. The award was conferred upon them for their role in rolling out the world’s largest 5G network in the shortest time across India. The award was received by Madhu Arora, Advisor – Technology, DoT on behalf of Dr Mittal; Kapil Ahuja, CEO (North), Reliance Jio on behalf of Oommen; and Rahul Vats, Chief Regulatory Officer, Bharti Airtel on behalf of Vittal.

The Lifetime Achievement Award was conferred upon Reliance Industries’ Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the communications sector and efforts towards bridging the digital divide. The award was received by Kapil Ahuja on his behalf.

The awards were decided by an in-person Jury process chaired by Dr R K Upadhyay, CEO of C-DOT and included telecom industry veterans and experts.

Award parameter

The V&D Telecom Person and Pathbreaker awards are given for the initiatives and achievements by individuals, a group, or a company in the last 12–18-month period. The Lifetime Achievement Award, however, evaluates the individual’s overall contribution to the industry and impact in the past 3-4 decades.

The Telecom Person of the Year Award recognises the overall leadership, vision, and impact on the organisation, industry, and the country, including the contributions towards driving the company’s growth. The Pathbreaker Award, as the name suggests focuses on innovative services, creative and ingenious products, technology, services, and processes. The Jury also evaluates the impact of the innovation on the industry and the company, the size, scale, and complexity of the project, product, technology, service, process and the level of their maturity.

Award Jury Process

Phase 1 - Nominations: Voice&Data sought nominations from the industry through an open online process. The online form was available for anyone to submit their nomination or that of others.

Phase 2 - Research: The V&D editorial team went through the nominations, did additional research on each individual, organisation and project, filtered them as per the pre-defined criteria, and created dossiers for each nominee. The nomination dossiers were shared with the jury members for their review before the actual Jury meeting was held.

Phase 3 - Jury Meeting: The in-person Jury meeting was held in Delhi, where Jury Members led by Dr R K Upadhyay, CEO of C-DOT reviewed each nomination threadbare, discussed the impact of individual nominees and projects at the company, industry and national level, deliberated on the long-term implications of the initiatives, decisions, and actions to unanimously decide on the winners.

List of Jury Members

Telecom Leadership Awards Jury Members 2022