“Whatever you do – just overdo it”

This was the golden rule that was followed by Mr. Ashish Kumar Chauhan which fetched him the “World’s TOP 100 CIO” at a young age (in his late thirties).
On completion of his post-graduation from IIM-A, he started his career in IDBI.After the volatility witnessed in the stock markets during the Harshad Mehta times, Government of India decided to take control of the situation & IDBI was given the responsibility of setting up a stock-exchange which would ensure greater transparency for investors, which was the major drawback of our stock-markets especially B.S.E. So a team of six people was formed to implement this project, of which Mr. Ashish was the youngest as well as the only Engineer (IIT-Bombay), others being Economists & Cost Accountants.

The team worked on the project by studying foreign markets. So, he was sent abroad to study the stock exchanges as well as the VSAT technology (which the committee was planning to implement for the first time in India).The outcome of the study was as follows:
* Most of the major stock exchanges abroad were floor based, but the team decided to implement screen based exchange.
* Needed satellite based telecom system for the running of the exchange.
* Needed a stock exchange which adopts the principle of an order driven market.

The cost of implementation the above was around 50 million dollars.
So, the NSE Set-Up consisted of 3 parts:
* Operational
* Informational
* Corporate governance

When NSE was set-up there were 35 brokers transacting with a group of 25 members assisting them.Today through NSE, 25 lakh trades take place a day, which is a lot more than what was thought off while setting up the exchange. Today NSE is the third largest stock exchange in the world in terms of the number of trades.

After his stint with IDBI he joined the Reliance Group, whose Infocomm project was revolutionizing the Indian telecommunication market by introduction of C.D.M.A technology . While the project was in its nascent stage, he was made the CIO of Reliance Infocomm.

However, this job was much challenging as he said, “Getting 1 million customers every month to Reliance Infocomm didn’t go off as smoothly as expected”. So, the main task of the CIO was organizing the processes in an efficient manner to take care of the major flaws like data dropping and non-availability of a consistent customer database, which was causing a lot of concern to Mr.Mukesh Ambani.
Setting up Real Time Data Entry System on their own network which was not heard off ever—fetched him the CIO 100 award.