CII goes for major recast

The Confederation of Indian Industry has gone in for a major restructuring operation with sweeping horizontal level changes that came into effect this Monday. This may be the biggest restructuring undertaken by the industry chamber in its history.

Under the new regime, Virendra Gupta, who was a part of the CII Mumbai operations, will take over as its regional director (southern operations), replacing Rajesh Menon, who now heads planning and internal governance in CII.

Sujith Haridas has been moved from CII headquarters to the post of regional director (north), replacing Ratika Jain, who will take over as the head of the London office.

Deepak Sood has been called out from CII's Bangalore operations to head its western region, where he replaces Marut Sengupta, who will head the Economic Affairs wing at the CII headquarters.

Sunil Kumar Mishra has been recalled from the Shanghai office as regional director of the eastern region, where he will replace Rajiv Singh.

'CII is a growing organisation and this operation has been necessitated by the kind of demand in terms of sheer variety of tasks that we now have to perform. It is aimed to align the organisation to focus itself on better delivery for its membership and human resources,' CII President R Seshasayee told Business Standard.

While the actual process of the appointees taking over their new posts is expected to take longer, the restructuring had first been hinted at when Seshasayee took over as the new president of the organisation.

A new department called policy and communication has been formed combining a host of existing sections. It will oversee areas like international trade, economic affairs, public policy and media relations. 

On whether the purpose of the restructuring was to make the organisation's workforce younger, Seshasayee said: 'There is nothing radical in it. We normally turnaround people to offer them better exposure and a more meaningful growth path for staff members.'

As part of the new realignment program, CII also plans to hire a PR agency to handle its public relations and media coverage. Earlier, its inhouse corporate communications team handled this aspect.

Now, while it will still have an internal team, sources said that hiring an external agency would help it in better managing its publicity. Several top PR agencies have been known to have pitched for CII's account.

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