Change of guard at Indus Towers

COO Bimal Dayal named CEO-designate

Indus Towers, the world’s largest telecom tower company, announced the elevation of Bimal Dayal as chief executive officer-designate. Dayal will take over from incumbent CEO B S Shantharaju, who will retire on March 31, 2016, after a six-year stint with the company.

Over the next six months, Shantharaju will oversee the transition and hand over reins to Dayal, who has been associated with Indus Towers since 2010 as chief operating officer. Prior to this, Dayal had worked with global majors  Ericsson, Qualcomm and Tata Telecom.

As managing director of Ericsson in Sri Lanka, he   steered the company to become the country’s number one in telecom infrastructure.

With data adoption growing at a fast clip, growth will be the focus of the new CEO. He says: “I cannot put a figure on tower growth, but if you look at  spectrum auction... all this is signalling change in the way in which a network is built and managed.”

Indus is an independently managed company, offering passive infrastructure services to all telecom operators. The company is a joint venture between Bharti Infratel, Vodafone India and Aditya Birla Telecom.

Indus has a presence in the 15 major telecom circles of India, and has achieved 261,159 tenancies till date, a first in the telecom tower sector globally.