Y.C. Deveshwar on Succession Planning

The demerger plan was first mooted in ITC's FY2019-2020 annual report, but Deveshwar succumbed to cancer on May 11, 2019 — before he could execute it. The pandemic then wrecked the hospitality industry. Sanjiv Puri put the demerger back on track as the post-pandemic hotel recovery took hold, with Q1 2023 results showing exceptional performance led by domestic travel.

Anand Nayak, former ITC HR head, tells Open that Deveshwar's greatest strength was articulating a mission framing ITC as a commercial enterprise with the overarching objective of 'putting India first' and creating value for the country. His concept of distributed leadership held that leadership was not concentrated with the top team but required at multiple organizational levels —.

Deveshwar joined ITC in 1968, became chairman in 1996, and from 1991 to 1994 served as chairman and managing director of Air India — a brief detour through India's national carrier between two ITC tenures. Returning to ITC in 1996, he faced the choice of staying in the comfort zone of a tobacco business ITC had run for nine decades or creating multiple new growth drivers to match the emerging Indian economy.