Kavya Hemadri · Chief Data Officer · India
Presented to the Board or a committee
Audit committee
April 2022–present
Presents the rent-roll reconciliation and valuation data pack before each half-yearly independent valuation, and answered the committee's questions on the 2023 refinancing delay.
Reported to a committee
Risk and sustainability committee of the board
July 2022–present
Quarterly reports on the privacy programme, the metering programme and data incidents; not a member of the committee.
| Capacity | Committees |
|---|---|
| Ready to join | Audit committee · Risk management committee · A technology or data committee where the board has formed one |
I am pursuing an independent directorship on the audit or risk management committee of a listed mid-cap company, or a large unlisted public company, whose sites generate operating data and personal data in volume. I would not seek to chair a committee in my first term. Under SEBI's listing regulations an independent director may serve on only a limited number of listed boards, and my executive role means one seat is the realistic number for me. I would ask any prospective board why it is adding a director now and what gap it expects me to fill, and I would want to meet the audit committee chair before accepting to see how operating reports are used at present. I am not looking for an advisory title or a route back into executive data work at another company. The appointment should be one where a careful reader of operating evidence strengthens the board's oversight.
Most boards I have watched receive operating figures as finished facts: occupancy, consumption, incidents, customers served. Very few see the definitions underneath them, and fewer still know which figures were measured and which were estimated. That gap becomes a governance question the moment an outside party relies on the number. I would help a board ask three questions of any operating figure that matters: who collected it and for what purpose, what it cannot support, and who outside the company will now rely on it. I would also bring practical knowledge of personal data held about people who never chose to deal with the company, such as visitors, patients' relatives or contractors at a gate, and of what the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 asks of the business that holds it. I have not been a director. On an audit or risk management committee I would contribute evidence-based questions rather than accounting expertise, and I would expect to learn the company's finance and reporting obligations from colleagues who know them better than I do.
During the 2023 refinancing, the question before our managing director was whether a known error could travel with a caveat. As a director I would ask the same question in reverse: when management offers a number with qualifications, which of those qualifications will survive into the documents of the lender, investor or regulator who relies on it? If the answer is none, the board is in effect certifying the unqualified number. I would not push a board towards delay as a matter of habit. The ₹1.7 crore of additional interest was a real cost, and some timetables matter more than a perfect record. My contribution would be to make the trade-off explicit, to ask who would be misled by proceeding, and to ensure the minutes record why the board chose as it did.
Our leasing team and an occupier's HR department both had sensible reasons to want gate records, and our head of security had a sound reason to keep them longer. None of them was the person the records described. On a board I would ask management to show, for any proposed use of personal data, the purpose for which it was originally collected and the notice people were given. A new purpose requires a new basis, not a new report. I would also ask what the company gives up by declining, because a privacy decision that ignores its commercial cost is unlikely to survive the next budget. In our case leasing lost a proposition, and the board needed to hear that before approving the policy rather than afterwards.
I would spend the first quarter learning how the company's operating data reaches the board. With the chair's agreement, I would ask management to walk me through two or three figures that appear in every board pack, from the point of collection to the page, including who is accountable at each step. I would want to visit at least one site and one control room. Before my first audit or risk management committee meeting I would read the last two years of internal audit findings that concern data, privacy or operating reports. During the year I would keep my questions to matters a committee can resolve, and avoid turning meetings into a data-governance seminar. At the end of the year I would ask the chair and the committee chair two things: which of my questions changed a decision or a disclosure, and where I had spent the committee's time on detail that management should have handled.
My employer's commercial web is wide. Sahyavati Parks has around 270 occupiers, several lenders, two firms of independent valuers, metering and security-systems suppliers and an overseas pension investor. A company in any of those positions would need careful review before I joined its board, and some would be ruled out at once: a competing owner of office or warehousing parks in Maharashtra, a bank lending against our rent rolls, or a valuer we appoint. For other companies I would give the chair a written list of relationships, update it whenever Sahyavati signed a material lease or contract, and step out of any discussion that touched them. Confidential lease terms, occupiers' consumption data and our visitor records would never come with me into another boardroom. If recusals became frequent, I would treat that as a sign the seat was wrong and offer to step down.
Before any appointment I would set out in writing every relationship that touches the company: whether it, its promoters or its group companies lease from, lend to, value for or supply Sahyavati Parks, and any interest held by my relatives. I would ask the company's counsel and company secretary to test that list against s.149(6) of the Companies Act. Whether I am independent is their judgement and the board's, not something I can assert on my own behalf.
IICA Independent Directors’ Databank: Registered
My registration with the IICA Independent Directors' Databank dates from March 2026. I do not claim any exemption from the online proficiency self-assessment test, which the rules require me to pass within a set period after registration, and I plan to take it before March 2027. Until I have passed it, this record does not describe me as fully prepared for an independent appointment.