Mr. Rohan Sarma is a social and behavioural scientist whose broad area of work has been to understand and analyse the dynamic relationship between Business and Society, and is focused on two curiosities:
1. How does business affect/impact society?
2. What externalities and risks affect/impact business and what are the strategies for mitigating these risks and converting into opportunities?
As a young leader who has steered several Government of India initiatives, rohan has demonstrated dexterity in participatory research and development planning with vulnerable communities as well as strategic management consulting with business leaders in India.
As a Change Management specialist, rohan continues to provide strategic counsel to public sector and private sector leaders in India through Responsible Business policy and programme formulation and developing frameworks and actions plans on CSR and Sustainability. rohan’s most noteworthy contribution has been in developing the ‘Assessment and Empanelment Standards for Development Institutions in India’ (AESDII) in 2011, as one of the founding members of India’s first Government of India supported and funded CSR thinktank at Asia’s premier social sciences institute – the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai.
For over a decade, rohan has built ‘purpose driven’ institutions, both within public institutions and private sector impact consulting, by founding and leading high performance, inter-disciplinary and high energy teams. rohan is passionate about Purpose, curious about Compassionate Capitalism, an advocate of Sustainability, an avid supporter of interventions pertaining to neglected thematics,geographies and peoples, and a practitioner of interdisciplinarity, diversity and integration. He is an optimist about the transformative power of business to create a sustainable future.
As an artist, his initiative – the Visual, Aural and Sociological (VAS) Project – aims to co-create open access, autonomous, and public infrastructures of thinking, learning and acting through interactive and discursive pedagogies. rohan advises some non-profits and mentors several young professionals, development enthusiasts and social entrepreneurs, through his initiative ‘Community
of Purpose’.
As a strategic communications enthusiast, in his last engagement as the youngest ‘Director’ at one of the world’s oldest and largest global strategic communications agencies, with the mandate to build a new Social Impact Practice for METIA region, rohan provided strategic counsel to global corporations on building and designing brands (with a focus on purpose and sustainability),protecting brands (from risks) through strategy and handholding to communicate a brand’s social and environmental impacts on various stakeholders. Currently, as a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Responsible Business, rohan provides strategic counsel to Public and Private Sector Boards and senior leadership in integrating and embedding sustainability into core business practices.
rohan sarma has been and continues to be invited as an expert to serve on national committees
and taskforces pertaining to Rural Development and Sustainable Development Goals, by India’s
leading industry body, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). Given his contributions to the CSR and Sustainability sector in India through policy, research and thought leadership, in June 2023, rohan was invited by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), Government of India, India’s National Standards body, to serve on India’s first drafting committee on the National ESG Standards as the ‘Social Expert’. In September 2023, rohan was conferred additional charge as the Convenor/Chair of the Working Group on Topical Standards for ‘Affected Communities’. In May 2024, rohan was invited by India’s national standards body, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), as an expert on the ‘Research Evaluation Committee’ of the Management Systems Department (MSD-10) Sectional Committee, to evaluate R&D institutional research proposals for grants sanctioning. Given his research focus and advocacy on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), rohan has been nominated from India to serve on the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Technical Committee ISO/PC 343 on SDG Management.