Rajesh Varrier on leadership
From Cognizant India Turning Up The Heat On Gender Equity | Future Female Forward | CNBC TV18 · · CNBC-TV18
“Propel is actually an award-winning program — we have a Brandon Hall award for Propel and thousands of women associates who have gone through Propel. Propel is really about taking managers and making leaders out of them.”
On , Rajesh Varrier, President of Operations & MD and Chairman of Cognizant India at Cognizant, spoke about leadership during Cognizant India Turning Up The Heat On Gender Equity | Future Female Forward | CNBC TV18 on CNBC-TV18.
About Rajesh Varrier
Rajesh Varrier, President of Global Operations and Managing Director and Chairman of Cognizant India, has spoken in several public forums in 2025 and early 2026 about gender equity, AI training, and inclusion initiatives at Cognizant. In conversations with CNBC-TV18, he described the company's Shakti program, a four-tier framework designed to support women at different career stages, including "Be Gritty" for new hires, "Rise" for those transitioning to management, "Propel" for developing senior leaders, and a returnship program for women re-entering the workforce after a break. Varrier stated that Cognizant has close to 40% women in its workforce, and he emphasized the importance of flexible policies, allyship, sponsorship, and training on unconscious bias to address the drop in women's representation at leadership levels. He also said that AI presents an opportunity to be a "leveler" and that the company is working to train all employees on AI technologies, with a goal of enabling one million people through its Synapse platform. Varrier also participated in a "Conversations of Change" dialogue with Cornelius Lyngdoh, a visually impaired individual supported by Enable India and the Cognizant Foundation, where he discussed the foundation's 20-year history of empowering lives. In a separate conversation with badminton coach Pullela Gopichand ahead of the Cognizant New Delhi Marathon, Varrier discussed lessons from sport, including the value of learning from failure and the importance of teamwork. Earlier, in a 2024 podcast, he outlined three pillars for the future of customer experience: speed and ease of digital integration, real-time feedback response, and data privacy with customer consent. He also noted that collaboration tools have become essential for enterprises and that remote work poses challenges to social capital.