Bharat Salhotra, managing director, India and South Asia, ALSTOM Transport, has been associated with ALSTOM Transport India for the past three years and has spearheaded the company’s expansion in India. Today, it is well positioned to serve not only the Indian market but also the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.
Under his leadership, ALSTOM has been able to make successful forays into the mainline railway and urban metro markets. It has been awarded a contract worth over 3 billion euros by Indian Railways (IR) to manufacture and supply 800 electric locomotives, under the central government’s Make in India initiative. Prior to ALSTOM, Salhotra worked as director, finance, Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Limited. Here, he was responsible for developing business plans and concession agreements and negotiating loan conditions with the World Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.
A well-known figure in the Indian railway sector, he has also been instrumental in promoting light rail turnkey solutions for Tier II cities across the country. Salhotra says, “My focus has been on sensitising Indian customers to the need to adopt optimised transport solutions from the life cycle point of view.”
During his stint with the Government of India, he has served on a high-powered team of experts set up by the World Bank for developing a 20-year perspective plan for IR. In this capacity, Salhotra played a leadership role for putting in place a slew of processes and decision support tools used for defining IR’s long-term investment strategy and prioritising its investments.
Salhotra is also credited with developing the first online transaction processing system for IR in the early 1990s. This system created a paradigm shift in the way accounting transactions are processed. It facilitated timely and accurate generation of critical management information reports, leading to improved decisions and a better work environment.
Besides being an alumnus of IIM Calcutta, he also has an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Among the publications to his credit, Salhotra has co-authored one with the Deputy Dean of the Sloan School. He has also authored a landmark case study on India’s first public-private partnership initiative in the port sector. In May 2015, he was appointed Chevalier de l’Órdre National du Merite by the President of France.