Bharti Airtel Names Abhay Savargaonkar as CTO

Abhay Savargaonkar will be the new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Bharti Airtel, replacing Jagbir Singh. Savargaonkar is currently serving as the Chief for Network Operations. Singh has over 24 years of experience in the field of telecom, having worked with Bharti’s Infotel group, Nortel (in Asia-Pac role), Lucent Technologies and in Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Government of India. In April 2011, Singh had rejoined Airtel as the company’s CTO and Director, Network Services Group after a nine-month stint with Reliance Communications as its President (Technology and Networks) between July 2010-April 2011. At Reliance Communications, he was involved in rolling out the telco’s 3G services simultaneously in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chandigarh. Singh had initially joined Airtel in 2001. He was responsible for the telco’s strategic planning of Mobile Network, providing strategic direction, deciding the network architecture, leading the complete mobility network team, 3G strategy and planning team and WiMax deployment team. On 2006, Savargaonkar joined Airtel. He has been involved in almost all network verticals, including 3G, planning and deployment. For the past one-and-a-half year, Savargaonkar has been running network operations across all lines of business in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.