Kevin Vaz named visionary leader of the year at BCS Ratna Awards

NEW DELHI: Kevin Vaz has bagged one of Indian media’s most coveted individual honours. The chief executive, entertainment at JioStar, has been named Visionary Leader of the Year at the 12th BCS Ratna Awards 2026, a nod to a career spent rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment rather than merely following them.

The award recognises more than a job title. Vaz has spent years pushing content strategy, platform innovation and creative risk-taking to the front of the queue at one of the country’s most closely watched entertainment businesses. Since the formation of JioStar, the media behemoth born of the Reliance-Disney merger, Vaz has been central to shaping how the combined entity approaches entertainment programming across television and streaming, at a moment when Indian viewers are shifting appetites faster than most broadcasters can react.

Industry watchers will note the timing. JioStar has been consolidating its position as India’s largest entertainment and sports media company, and leadership recognition of this kind tends to land when the underlying business is firing on most cylinders. Vaz’s citation for innovation, creativity and transformation reads as much as an endorsement of JioStar’s broader strategy as it does of the man himself, a signal that the merged entity’s entertainment vertical is finding its stride.

The BCS Ratna Awards have built a reputation as one of the industry’s more credible peer-recognition platforms, and a win in the visionary leader category typically goes to executives seen as setting direction for the sector rather than simply managing within it. For Vaz, the honour cements a reputation built over a long innings in Indian television and entertainment, one that has spanned programming leadership at Star India and now the top entertainment job at its successor organisation.

Expect the recognition to sharpen focus on JioStar’s next moves, particularly as competition in India’s streaming and broadcast space continues to intensify and every large player scrambles to define what leadership in entertainment actually looks like in an AI-accelerated, platform-first era.