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Puri’s Anarock hires Housing’s Rahul Yadav
MUMBAI: Anarock Property Consultants, which the real estate expert Anuj Puri launched last month, has appointed Housing.com’s co-founder and ex-CEO Rahul Yadav as the chief product & technology officer. Before joining Anarock, Rahul also advised Lodha Group for a brief period.
Anarock chairman Puri said: “This appointment is in line with Anarock’s highly technology-driven orientation and business model for its residential advisory services.”
“The online real estate business is still in its fledgling stage in India and we are taking the lead on boosting it into maturity. So far, the real estate sector has not been able to emulate the success of ecommerce for consumer durables and services. We intend to change that, and Rahul Yadav’s experience in harnessing the consumer housing market at via technology will add the key element. The cutting-edge and highly consumer-focused technology platform and support infrastructure we will build here will bring in a complete transformation of the residential property business.”
Indeed, real estate in India continues to see most of its success as an offline business, with very little technological innovation happening to speed up its adoption as a viable online business model. Real estate advisories, online property listing aggregators and even developers have made some headway, but this field nevertheless remains underserved because of lack of integration with credible expert offline advisory and transaction support. In short, the continued challenge lies in successful sales conversion in a manner which also places the customer’s interests first.
“Indian residential buyers and investors will not embrace an ecommerce model of property purchase unless they get a seamless experience from online selection to offline advisory and transaction closure,” says Puri. “We have already pioneered this model in the Indian real estate space and will now back it with a robust technology infrastructure, in the building of which Rahul Yadav will now be instrumental. Backed by our firm business philosophy of ethics, integrity and values over value, we are now taking the online real estate business in India to the final level.”
Rahul Yadav has demonstrated outstanding success in setting up of a real estate search portal wherein prospective buyers can conduct housing searches based on geography, unit size and various other key factors. He has pioneered the verified listings and data approach to the online real estate business in India. As the brain behind a highly successful, technology-intensive platform, Rahul Yadav’s credentials are well-established.
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Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
