Episode 7: In Talks with Gangapriya Chakraverti

Recorded On 29^th April, 2026
In this episode, Gangapriya Chakraverti,, Managing Director and India Site Head at Ford Motor Company, sits down with Vidya to trace an unusua path to corporate leadership in running a 12,000-plus workforce at Ford Business Solutions, the Global Capabilities Centre in Chennai that supports Ford's worldwide operations. Gangapriya represents a relatively rare archetype in the Indian industry: an HR Director who has moved into a Managing Director's mandate.

She compares the three organisational environments that have shaped her: the Murugappa Group, family-owned but professionally managed, where as a young trainee posted to a factory in Ranipet she was allowed onto the shop floor on night shifts; Mercer, a women-dominated consulting firm that she says practised inclusion ‘without ever mentioning DEI’; and Ford, which she joined in 2012 as Director–Human Resources and, in 2020, took over as Managing Director.

Education and effort are braided together in her story. After topping her TISS class, she was - ironically - the only one without a job; the company of her dreams had not selected her, and the disappointment had pulled her out of the placement process altogether. On the discipline of education itself, she is sharp about the AI moment: the young, she argues, must know a domain well enough to recognise when AI is wrong.

The glass ceiling for women in corporate India, Gangapriya argues, is at least partly self-imposed - a conditioning that one must be 110 per cent ready before raising a hand, a discomfort with failure, a default assumption that career breaks are women's to take. The corresponding burden on men, to be the primary breadwinner, with no socially permissible exit route, is a part of the conversation India still rarely has.

Her closing advice to the next generation is unexpectedly tactile: cultivate a hobby, preferably one that uses your hands - because in an AI age, the parts of yourself that you make, grow and shape with your own hands will matter more, not less.

To download the episode transcript, click here