Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, SII's Poonawalla to be conferred with Padma Bhushan

Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Serum Institute of India (SII) MD Cyrus Poonawalla featured in the list of 17 awardees to be conferred with Padma Bhushan this year.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) released the list of Padwa Awardees 2022 on the eve of 73rd Republic Day.

Padma Bhushan is India's third-highest civilian award after Bharat Ratna and Padma Vibhushan.

The Padma Awards are given in three categories: Padma Vibhushan (for exceptional and distinguished service), Padma Bhushan (distinguished service of higher-order) and Padma Shri (distinguished service). The award seeks to recognise achievements in all fields of activities or disciplines where an element of public service is involved.

Chandrasekaran is the Chairman of the Board at Tata Sons, the holding company and promoter of all Tata group companies. The Tata group companies, across 10 business verticals, have aggregate annual revenues over $110 billion, as per company website.

Chandra joined Tata Sons board in October 2016 and was appointed Chairman in January 2017. He also chairs the Boards of several group operating companies, including Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tata Power, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – of which he was CEO from 2009-17.

Pichai, the CEO of American tech giant Alphabet Inc, is an Indian-born techie who graduated from IIT Kharagpur in metallurgical engineering. In US, he attained MS from the prestigious Stanford University in materials science and engineering and further attained an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar, respectively.

Nadella is India-born Chairman & CEO of Microsoft. He joined Microsoft in 1992 and went on to become executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group. "In this role he led the transformation to the cloud infrastructure and services business, which outperformed the market and took share from competition. Previously, Nadella led R&D for the Online Services Division and was vice president of the Microsoft Business Division. Before joining Microsoft, Nadella was a member of the technology staff at Sun Microsystems," according to Microsoft.

Poonawalla is Chairman of Poonawalla Group which includes the privately owned Serum Institute of India (SII), India’s top biotech company and the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume of doses produced and sold globally.

In 1966, Dr Poonawalla founded SII which launched its first therapeutic anti-tetanus serum within two years, and began producing the anti-tetanus vaccines. By 1974 Serum Institute introduced the DTP vaccine, which protects children from diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, followed by an anti-snake-venom serum for snakebites in 1981.