Our Team

Kalpana Tatavarti

Founder, Director

Kalpana brings diverse experience of over 30 years spanning Diversity & Inclusion, Leadership Development, Marketing and Sales.

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Laxmi Char

Co-Founder

Laxmi has over 20 years of extensive leadership experience in training & development, project management, and projects aimed at driving revenue.

She served in leadership positions in companies, such as Yahoo and Dell.

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Rajiv Raghunandan

Chief Consultant, Thought Leadership

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Rianna Lobo

Rianna is a POSH consultant at Parity. During her career, Rianna has represented some of the world’s largest Fortune 500 companies such as Apple, Intuit, Expedia, Samsung, and Lenovo.

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Jyothsna Hirode

Jyothsna is an accomplished Diversity and Inclusion Leader, with industry experience of over 25 years. She brings deep expertise in the design and delivery of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) programs.

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Surabhi Parvatikar

Surabhi is Head – Sales & Marketing and comes with over 15 years of experience across pre-sales, marketing and program management in the technology consulting and D&I verticals.

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Piyush Tyagi

Piyush brings over three decades of unique rich experience in building and leading strong sustainable teams to achieve business objectives in domestic and international environments. She is a successful combination of strong communication and leadership skills with versatile experience in Operational Excellence, Stakeholder Management, Continuous Process Improvement, Coaching & training, Talent Management & strategy, Change Management and Business Development.

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Dr Rashmi Devanath

Rashmi Devanath holds a Ph. D in Psychology. She has over 25 years of work experience. Her first career was in the academia, teaching various Psychology papers to graduate and post graduate students. She had her teaching stints at Jyoti Nivas college, SDM college and Bangalore University.

Dr. Rashmi’s second career was in the IT services Industry and is a certified Learning and Development
professional.

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Anuja

Anuja has total 20 years of corporate experience in consulting in HR as well as Technology.

She has played various leadership roles in HR including but not limited to HR head, Gender diversity advisor and Talent Acquisition Head. She was chairperson of POSH committee on multiple occasions and has set up POSH framework during her tenure as HR head in many organizations.

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Vasunthara Ravichandran

With a bachelors degree in Engineering and a Masters in Social Work, Vasundhara is passionate about Diversity and Inclusion.

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Savitha Manian

Savitha takes care of operations at Parity Consulting. As a quick learner and go getter and a flexible person, she comes with a background of teaching and admin experience.

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Kalpana Tatavarti

CEO, Parity Consulting

Areas of Expertise

Business Consulting

Women Leadership

Workplace Inclusion

Prevention of Sexual Harassment

Coaching

Trainer

Leadership Development

"Without inclusion, diversity has no meaning"

Kalpana brings diverse experience of over 30 years spanning Diversity & Inclusion, Leadership Development, Marketing and Sales.

She spent the early part of her career in the corporate world in Marketing & Sales. Later, as Founder at Maarpidi, a Leadership Development Firm, she supported several organizations to grow their leadership pipelines.
Her work in diversity, equity and inclusion spans 12 years during which she has partnered with marquee clients across industries to build inclusive workplaces in India & Dubai.
A Masters in Marketing & Sales, Kalpana is a certified Executive Coach, besides being certified in several transformational frameworks and tools.

She serves as an Independent Director on the boards of listed companies. She is also Founder of Manasvini, an NGO, providing micro credit to economically disadvantaged women. (www.manasvini.org)

Certifications:

Masters in Marketing & Sales
Executive Coach from the Coaching Foundation of India
Psychometric instruments such as MBTI, FIRO-B, DISC and the EQ-i 2.0
Transactional Analysis (Org.), NLP (Master Practitioner) and Yoga

She is a member of the Core Committee at BSafe, a safety initiative of BPac in Bangalore.

An accomplished Carnatic Vocal singer, she enjoys writing both creative fiction & professional articles.

Laxmi Char

Co-Founder

Areas of Expertise

Leadership Training

Talent Development

Women Leadership

Workplace Inclusion

Prevention of Sexual Harassment

Multi-Cultural Sensitization

Project Management

Laxmi has over 20 years of work experience with global companies in India and overseas. She has extensive experience managing diverse stakeholders, and is adept at leading simultaneous projects aimed at increasing engagement, expanding market penetration, and driving revenue. Her cross-cultural communication skills and drive for results has helped her to thrive in high pressure situations, and innovate for change.

Most recently, Laxmi was the Senior Director at Yahoo’s Global Business Solutions team, and was responsible for planning and project management across internal business leaders, talent managers and external vendors. Prior to Yahoo, Laxmi was the first woman to be hired as an Area Manager at Dell’s India based International Services subsidiary. She has held senior positions in leading Direct Marketing and Express Distribution companies.

She is a certified Trainer, having led the Learning and Continuous Development team at Dell. She has led training sessions on leadership, talent development, global communication and diversity challenges in India and internationally.

Rajiv Raghunandan

Areas of Expertise

Business Consulting

Business Process Outsourcing

Growth Ventures

Rajiv Raghunandan is Managing Partner at seedX, a high touch advisory and fund raising platform for early stage & growth ventures in India. He has over 17 years of experience across business consulting, outsourcing (BPO), technology and corporate finance in a variety of organisations such as Andersen Consulting, Infosys BPO, InfraHedge (A State Street Subsidiary) and Arvind Mills Ltd. His longest corporate stint was with Infosys BPO where he spent 11 years building the business from its infancy across all aspects of the services lifecycle namely sales, solutions, implementation and delivery.

Over the last 6 years, Rajiv has also been actively involved with multiple early stage ventures in different capacities. Ranging from advising on strategy, marketing & operations to himself being an angel investor in a couple of ventures, Raijv has inculcated a passion for enabling success of emerging ventures.

Rajiv holds a PGDM from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He has a graduate degree in accounting and a degree in management accounting from the Institute of Cost Accountants of India.

Rianna Lobo

Areas of Expertise

Prevention of Sexual Harassment Women Leadership

Rianna has pursued her LL.B. from Law Faculty, Delhi University and is currently pursuing her Masters in Business Laws from National Law School, Bangalore. She has been practicing law for more than 13 years and is the first Indian lawyer to practice Indian law in Japan.

During her tenure, she has represented some of the world's largest Fortune 500 companies such as Apple, Intuit, Expedia, Samsung, Lenovo. She has advised companies in their multi-million dollar acquisitions as well as assisted start-ups in structuring their investment deals.

She has advised domestic and multinational clients on various aspects of employment law from furlows, misconducts, disciplinary issues, terminations, employment contracts, confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements, drafting of human resource manuals, pre and post-employment restrictions, work conditions, maternity benefits, closures, etc.

She has also drafted prevention of sexual harassment policies, and conducted exhaustive workshops on prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace, gender sensitization, etc., for her clients across industries. She serves as the external member of the anti-sexual harassment committees of clients, and has considerable experience in sexual harassment complaints.

Jyothsna Hirode

Areas of Expertise

Diversity & Inclusion Programs and Polices

Women Leadership Programs

Unconscious Bias Programs

Program Design, Development and Implementation

Program and Project Management

Cross-cultural programs

Strategic Planning and Consulting in D&I

Employee Resource Groups

Employee Handbooks

Diversity and Inclusion Learning

Diversity & Inclusion Surveys

Diversity Research and Analysis

Jyothsna is an accomplished Diversity and Inclusion Leader, with industry experience of over 25 years. She brings deep expertise in the design and delivery of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) programs. She has worked in several organizations in the IT sector and has created winning strategies to engage, grow and retain talent. These are based on a deep understanding of the ever-changing business needs, garnered through 15 years of line experience before she moved into Human Resources and specialized in D&I.

In her tenure in the D&I function in IBM, she led the advancement of women and cross-cultural programs in India/South Asia. She has set strategy, influenced leadership teams to own objectives and sponsor programs. She has also set up governance systems via Diversity and Women’s Leadership Councils. During this period, IBM India/South Asia was recognized by NASSCOM through the prestigious Best IT Products and Services Company for D&I Award. Later, as a D&I leader in the Global Diversity Center of Competence, she led the global surveys and awards process, supported over 120 Employee Resource Groups across the globe, and partnered with Global Talent Directors to support several business units for their D&I solutions. More recently she has consulted with Capgemini, especially in the area of women leadership.

Prior to her foray into D&I, Jyothsna was an award-winning people manager and worked to train and enable other people managers of a large business unit. Even earlier, she was in the core business of IT application development and management services. She has worked in startups as well as in large organizations in India and abroad and enjoyed the challenges of the software development and implementation business.

Motivated to extend her work with women leadership to the disadvantaged, she now engages regularly with a non-profit to enable underprivileged women increase their employability and connects them to opportunities.

She has a post-graduate certificate in human resource management from XLRI, Jamshedpur, and a bachelor’s degree in Engineering in Electronics & Communication.

Surabhi Parvatikar

Surabhi is Head - Sales & Marketing and comes with over 15 years of experience across pre-sales, marketing and program management in the technology consulting and D&I verticals. Surabhi seamlessly integrates enterprise solutioning through customized delivery, thought leadership and sales processes.

A result-oriented and strategically driven professional bringing agility and ownership across SMEs, mid-sized brands and start-ups with an in-depth understanding of business environments, she comes with expertise across pre-sales, marketing, content, program management and delivery, research and stakeholder management.

Piyush Tyagi

Areas of Expertise

Personal Effectiveness

Selling Skills

Assertiveness for Women

Leadership Skills

POSH

Customer Service

Change Management

Her corporate experience of over two decades includes relevant stints at NIIT Ltd., Schoolnet India Pvt Ltd (an IL&FS initiative), Max New York Life Insurance Co. Ltd., Om Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd., GE Global Servicing, Brickwork India Ltd. and LabourNet Services India Pvt Ltd.

As a Coach, a trainer and a consultant, she enjoys working with people in their journey of personal evolution, growth and achievement of their goals. She is an effective facilitator and has trained a cross section of executives, individuals across- Personal Effectiveness, Selling Skills, Assertiveness for Women, Leadership skills, Coaching & People Development, POSH in workplace, Customer Service and more.

Piyush has been actively involved in Diversity and Inclusivity initiatives at workplace. She has been a Core team member of Women’s network groups and has been an internal committee member on POSH committees.

She is driven by a sense of self inquiry, leading her to attend self-enriching programs including 7 Habits of Highly effective people, Change Acceleration Program, Six Sigma, NLP, Mind Power, Reiki, Transcendental Meditation, Inner engineering and Love Yourself, Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. She practices Access Bar and Vipassana.

She is a Certified Master Spirit Life Coach from CCA (recognized by International Coaches Federation) and an Internationally certified Workshop leader by Heart Inspired Inc. (USA), for the acclaimed work of Louise Hay. She is an internationally licensed workshop leader for Access Consciousness Bars. She is also a Vipassana practitioner.

She holds a Masters in Business (MBA-PE) with specialization in Strategy.

Dr Rashmi Devanath

Learning and Development

Areas of Expertise

Organisational Development

Learning and Development

Dr. Rashmi’s second career was in the IT services Industry and is a certified Learning and Development
professional.

She was involved in large-scale organizational development (OD) interventions encompassing a workforce of two hundred thousand employees. Her key interventions designed at the organizational level are Customer-Facing Readiness, Inclusion and Diversity and Organizational values.

Of the three, Inclusion and Diversity was a game changer. The InD intervention began with one program for women which she designed and delivered. The impact was such that a slew of interventions was designed by Dr. Rashmi- for women at various levels of their career, for male employees to be mindful of their gender beliefs and actions, leadership journey programs for senior women and managing maternity (pre and post pregnancy) for the women and their managers (pre and post pregnancy).

Dr. Rashmi is known for keeping the interventions sharp and elicit unabashed responses from women participants. Here is a glimpse of programs designed and delivered by her The first program for young women focused on Career-oriented behaviors. The program unearthed career-gender beliefs that could either hamper or promote women’s personal growth. Additionally, the workshop participants were provided a framework to charter their career path.

Subsequently, based on the demand by women managers, Women Rise was developed. Women Rise
focused on Confidence, Networking and Negotiation skills. Each of these capabilities highlighted the
subconscious gender nuances that impacts how the skills are learnt and demonstrated. The gap between the experience and expression of women’s needs and ways to minimize the gap was central to the program.Senior women’s programs equipped women with executive presence, coaching and access to leadership meetings | shadowing and drawing collaborative strategic relationships among themselves.

Dr. Rashmi has successfully got her team, peers and HR persons onboarded by conducting several Train the trainer. Entrusted with the InD charter for her strong beliefs and program management capabilities, she widened the scope of DEI at organizational level.

Currently, she divides her time between academia and Industry. Rashmi is now extremely directional in students’ projects and looks for opportunities to embed DEI. She is now encouraging young researchers to focus on Women with disabilities.

Anuja

Areas of Expertise

Anuja has total 20 years of corporate experience in consulting in HR as well as Technology.

She has played various leadership roles in HR including but not limited to HR head, Gender diversity advisor and Talent Acquisition Head. She was chairperson of POSH committee on multiple occasions

and has set up POSH framework during her tenure as HR head in many organizations.

Before moving to HR she has worked as Software consultant in Mumbai/New York /Atlanta. Some of the organizations where she has worked are AKQA, Catalyst, mokSa Technologies, Ameyo, Unisys Corporation, TCS.

As a trainer and facilitator she has hosted many round table events on gender diversity with leading companies like DuPont, Novartis, Genpact. She has also helped them design high impact strategy that improves both the diversity of their workforce and the well-being of their organization.

She has a postgraduate degree in HR from IIM (Kolkata) and an Engineering degree (B.E.) in Electronics. Anuja is passionate about seeking equal opportunity for women in every sphere of life. Anuja is an avid traveler who loves travelling to different countries and meeting people from diverse backgrounds. She is also a Vipassana practitioner. She presently resides in Gurgaon along with her husband and two children.

Savitha Manian

Areas of Expertise

Operations Management

Financial Management

Savitha takes care of operations at Parity Consulting. As a quick learner and go getter and a flexible person, she comes with a background of teaching and admin experience.

Savitha holds a post graduation degree in Computer Science. She has also done certification in embedded systems, data warehousing and manual testing. Savitha loves spending time together with her son and playing badminton. Her areas of interest include practicing Yoga, Bharatanatyam and net surfing.