User:Sunilkhokhar/Harsh Singh Lohit

Harsh Singh Lohit

Professional Career

Harsh was co-founder of TechSpan in 1998 under the leadership of Indian IT industry pioneer Arjun Malhotra (co-founder of HCL, 1975) which merged with Headstrong in October 2003. Harsh is currently Managing Director and a member of the global executive team that is led by Sandeep Sahai, President & CEO at Headstrong, a ~ $250 million IT services company specializing in software solutions for customers in the global capital markets. A 24-year veteran of the IT software services industry, Harsh is one of the architects of Headstrong's successful globally distributed delivery strategy and is responsible for managing the 3,500 workforce across the company’s Global Delivery Centers (GDCs) in India and the Philippines. The GDCs will deliver over $100 million of customer projects in CY 2011.

Harsh has been instrumental in establishing a work culture based on shared values across the India management team. The company has a balanced scorecard approach to performance, based on widely-diffused performance metrics and a culture of rigorous and consistent execution providing equal weight to a culture of performance and a ‘people matter’ approach. Harsh’s transparent and demanding management style is founded on attracting committed leadership with high personal integrity and draws inspiration from hard-nosed, measurable performance-based American management models. He has played multiple impactful roles in Headstrong over the years since 1998 including being the global sponsor of HR, the global head of Technology & Infrastructure and global sponsor of the Quality function.

The company’s operational style is centered around a balanced scorecard measurement of performance against that year’s (a) budgeted Profit & Loss (b) Customer project delivery, and (c) workforce engagement. This operating maturity and widespread core values-based culture has enabled the company keep pace with the demands of business growth. Traditional offshore project delivery managers have evolved from being technical and delivery focused to a business partner for the customer, proposing the right kind of services focused on the customer’s business needs.

Life at Headstrong India has always been more than work, and there are multiple opportunities for individuals to add value to themselves and to the community around them while pursuing their career. One singular effort towards community engagement is the Chirag Foundation, an employee-funded volunteer trust which supported the children of Army war widows in Bareilly since 1993, and has now evolved into a INR 7 million organization supporting multiple initiatives including supporting the 400 child Salma Public School in Rataul village, Baghpat, UP.

Harsh has actively represented NASSCOM in the Delhi region, and for 3 years till August 2011 was the Chair of the NASSCOM NOIDA Regional Council that brings together IT services and BPO companies in NODIA that together generate revenues of $10 billion. Prior to this, Harsh was also the Headstrong representative in Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Uttar Pradesh, where he drove the IT Task Force in the early 2000’s. Before TechSpan, Harsh was with IIS Infotech in Delhi (now a part of Steria Ltd.) as Chief Operating Officer (1995-1998); with CMC Limited from 1988, and he was the designated Head of International Markets when he left in 1995.

Background

Harsh Lohit went to St. Xavier’s School, Delhi, where he participated enthusiastically in school student politics, sports and theater and graduated with a passion for reading, learning and a commitment to social causes. In 1985, Harsh went to the USA to pursue an MBA from the University of Rhode Island (URI) where he excelled academically and graduated with a major in Finance with Beta Gamma Sigma honors, in the top 5% of his 1987 MBA class, and in the Top 20% of all AACSB accredited MBAs in the USA.

Harsh values the ethic of hard work, is fiercely independent, and believes in transparency and integrity as the bedrock of his relationships. He reads Indian history, religion, politics and business literature. Harsh travels widely to photograph using film www.sacredspaces.in.

Harsh married his college sweetheart, Rabab, in 1985 and she remains his moral lightening rod and best friend. Rabab belongs to a prominent Shia Muslim family in India: her maternal great-grandfather Sir Sultan Ahmad (1880-1963) from Gaya, Bihar was an eminent jurist, administrator and statesman. He was a member of the British Viceroy’s cabinet, and was one of the few prominent Muslim leaders who opposed the partition of India and stayed back in the land of his ancestors. Rabab’s paternal grandfather was from Amroha, Uttar Pradesh from where he was also elected to the UP state legislative assembly in the 1960s. Her father Syed Imam Hadi Naqvi was a graduate of the London School of Economics and worked as an economist in the Ministry of Finance.

Harsh’s deep interest in helping bring change to rural India is rooted in his family background and upbringing. Harsh’s maternal grandfather was Choudhary Charan Singh - a Gandhian, freedom fighter for India’s independence, and a prominent member of the Indian National Congress in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh from the 1920’s till 1969 when he set out on an independent, agrarian political path. Born to a peasant family, Charan Singh was a rare scrupulously honest politician. He revolutionized north Indian peasant politics and brought together the middle caste farming communities to present a rural-led model of India’s political and economic development. He held numerous ministerial posts in Uttar Pradesh from 1937 till 1975, and in the Janata Party government in Delhi in 1977-1979, and he was the Prime Minister of India in 1979.

Harsh’s paternal ancestors were peasant farmers and soldiers in the British and later in the Indian army, 100 kilometers from Delhi in the district of Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. His father was Dr. Jai Pal Singh, an accomplished surgeon who retired as the head of the prestigious RML (then Willingdon) Hospital in Delhi and was also Director of the Rohtak Medical College in Haryana. Dr. Singh was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India for his 40 years of dedicated commitment to medicine and its administration in the public sphere.

Harsh & Rabab’s son Zayn is in Colby College, Maine (USA) studying liberal arts and sciences.