Pernod Ricard India has elevated Namita Bharadwaj to the role of Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), effective March 2026. Based in Gurugram, Bharadwaj now leads the company’s end-to-end people strategy, with a mandate centred on talent transformation, organisational culture, and building a future-ready workforce to support growth in one of the group’s most strategically significant markets.
Bharadwaj brings 23 years of experience in human capital strategy to the role, with a specialism in Total Rewards that is relatively rare at CHRO level. She joined Pernod Ricard India in 2022, serving most recently as Head of Total Rewards, Performance, Analytics and Digital Experience – a remit that gave her direct visibility into the company’s workforce data architecture, executive remuneration frameworks, and digital employee experience. Her promotion reflects an internal confidence in continuity of strategic direction rather than a change of course.
Before joining Pernod Ricard, Bharadwaj spent 11 years at Mercer, where she rose to Principal leading the Rewards Design practice for India. The tenure gave her deep cross-sector exposure to compensation benchmarking, talent management advisory and executive pay design across a wide range of corporate clients. Prior to Mercer, she held roles at Vertex Data Science and Quark, where she moved from learning and development into compensation and performance management. She holds an MBA in Marketing and Human Resources from the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi.
Pernod Ricard India is now the group’s largest market by volume globally and its second-largest by value, after the United States. India contributes approximately 12 to 13 per cent of the group’s global revenues, with growth driven by both mainstream Indian whisky brands – Royal Stag and Blenders Pride – and accelerating demand for premium imports including Chivas Regal, The Glenlivet and Jameson. In the first half of FY26, net sales in India rose 4 per cent, with underlying growth accelerating to 8 per cent after excluding Imperial Blue, a brand that has since been divested.
Pernod Ricard India operates through more than 30 bottling plants across the country, with distilleries in Nashik, Maharashtra and Behror, Rajasthan. Against this operational scale – and with the group’s global leadership explicitly positioning India as its central engine of organic growth – the HR function carries considerable strategic weight. Managing a workforce of over 1,400 employees across multiple states, with talent pipelines spanning sales, manufacturing, marketing and corporate functions, demands the precise blend of rewards expertise and organisational design capability that Bharadwaj has developed over two decades.
Her appointment arrives at a pivotal moment for the group. Pernod Ricard’s global leadership is prioritising internally generated cash flows to reduce its debt burden, with a target of lowering the net debt-to-EBITDA ratio below 3x by FY2029. In that context, workforce productivity, retention of high-performing talent and digital HR infrastructure are not peripheral concerns – they are directly tied to margin performance. Bharadwaj’s background in performance analytics and digital employee experience positions her to contribute to both the people agenda and the broader commercial one.
