iWorld
Voot’s Akash Banerji moves on to join Amazon India’s centralized mobile biz development unit
KOLKATA: Voot’s Akash Banerji has put down his papers after a five-year stint with the digital arm of Viacom18. He will join Amazon India’s centralized mobile business development unit as marketing head in September end. At Voot, Banerji was serving as a business head for AVoD.
According to sources close to the development, Banerji will work closely with different businesses of Amazon ecosystem as well as the multiple strategic distribution partners (including telcos). In his new role, he will foster synergies with partners and create new product expansion strategies with the aim to drive subscription numbers and revenues.
Banerji joined Voot back in 2015 as vice president and head of marketing and partnerships. He was associated with the launch of the OTT platform which has now become one of the leading players with over 100 million monthly active users.
Being a media and marketing professional, he has worked across leading brands including Star India, Marico. During his stint at Star, he led the successful marketing launch of Hotstar as well as the marketing launch of the new Star Sports network.
We tried reaching out to Banerji, but he was not available at the moment.
iWorld
Akhil Gupta retires as Bharti Enterprises vice chairman after three decades
The man who outsourced Airtel’s network and built Indus Towers leaves behind a telecom industry transformed
NEW DELHI: He was not the most visible face of Bharti. He was, by most accounts, the most consequential one. Akhil Gupta, known within the group simply as AKG, has retired as vice chairman of Bharti Enterprises with effect from March 31st, 2026, closing a chapter that stretched across more than three decades and reshaped Indian telecoms in ways still felt today.
Gupta was there at the beginning, part of the core leadership team that steered Bharti Airtel from a scrappy domestic operator into one of the world’s largest telecom and digital services companies. But it is two decisions in particular that cement his legacy. The first was persuading the industry that a telecom company need not own its own network. His outsourcing partnerships with IBM and Ericsson, considered eccentric at the time, stripped out capital costs and sharpened Airtel’s competitive edge. The model was subsequently copied across the global industry. The second was the creation of Indus Towers, now one of the largest tower companies in the world.
Both initiatives were studied as case material at Harvard Business School, where Gupta himself had studied. A chartered accountant by training and a dealmaker by instinct, he accumulated industry accolades across his career without ever particularly courting the limelight.
Bharti Enterprises, announcing the retirement on LinkedIn, credited Gupta with building the foundation of the group’s success and driving innovation, partnerships and long-term value creation.
The tributes are deserved. Gupta did not just help build Airtel. In many respects, he helped invent the playbook that modern telecoms runs on.
