Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, February 2026 — Cipla has appointed Arun Kakatkar as its Global Chief People Officer, strengthening the company’s leadership agenda around people, culture, organization capability, and future-ready talent strategies across its global footprint. With decades of experience across HR leadership, organizational transformation, and business strategy, Kakatkar is expected to play a pivotal role in advancing Cipla’s purpose-led culture aligned with its credo of “Caring for Life.”
In this global leadership role, Kakatkar will bring deep expertise in shaping inclusive and high-performance cultures, strengthening leadership bench, and integrating people strategy with enterprise business priorities—critical for Cipla as it continues to scale across markets, therapeutic categories, and innovation-led healthcare models.
Prior to joining Cipla as Global Chief People Officer, Arun Kakatkar has been serving as a Human Resources Leader at Microsoft for about two years, where he has focused on shaping inclusive and high-performance culture, connecting organizational and talent strategies with business strategy, building high-performing leadership teams, and delivering unified people and culture strategies that enable business goals and agility.
Before Microsoft, Kakatkar spent over two years with Kalyani Group / Bharat Forge as President / Chief of Strategy and Organization, where he led corporate business strategy and organization building globally. In this role, he drove organizational transformation and renewal, strengthened leadership capacity, built operating mechanisms for performance and goal alignment, expanded leadership bench strength, and built HR function and processes aligned with business success and governance.
Earlier, he had a long and impactful tenure of around a decade at TE Connectivity, where he held multiple senior leadership roles including Managing Director India and Vice President Human Resources Asia Pacific. He led the India country business leadership team, oversaw shared services and manufacturing operations, strengthened governance and compliance mechanisms, enabled talent mobility, and served as Vice President HR for the Asia Pacific region—supporting a 9,000-employee regional footprint through HR transformation, holistic talent management, succession planning, and strategic talent acquisition.
In the early part of his career, Kakatkar also held key organization capability roles at Microsoft (Asia Pacific Region) in Singapore, including Director of People & Organization Capability and People & Organization Capability Lead, where he worked on leadership development, talent strategy, change management, and leadership team effectiveness across emerging markets. He also served with Flextronics as Senior HR Manager Asia Pacific, driving large-scale organizational restructuring and leadership talent review processes, and earlier worked at Ingersoll Rand for over six years as Head of Talent Management and Organization Development, covering talent management, leadership development, organizational capability building, and M&A integration projects across Asia Pacific.
Kakatkar began his leadership journey through HR roles at Foseco and Black & Decker, where he contributed to greenfield operations, HR systems setup, plant ramp-up, lean manufacturing environments, and major restructuring initiatives in unionized manufacturing settings—giving him strong foundations in both strategic HR and operational workforce transformation.
About Cipla
Cipla is a leading global pharmaceutical company trusted by healthcare professionals and patients across the world since 1935. Driven by its purpose of “Caring for Life,” Cipla maintains a compassionate approach to healthcare beyond profit and growth, with presence in 80+ countries, offering 1,500+ products across multiple therapeutic categories and dosage forms. Cipla has played a pivotal role in enabling access to high-quality medicines globally, including its paradigm-changing ARV therapy in Africa in 2001 that advanced affordability and inclusiveness in the HIV/AIDS movement. Cipla is also recognized for its respiratory leadership in India and other emerging markets, and its aspiration to become a global lung leader helping millions breathe free.
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