Devavrat Walinjkar: The Young Dynamite CHRO of Growth at Cairn Oil and Gas

Devavrat Walinjkar
Devarat Walinjkar

Devavrat is an HR professional with over three years of diverse experience in compensation and benefits (including Campus hire induction and onboarding), HR Transformation, policy formation, organization restructuring, performance management system and HRBP role, HRSS, HR setup, Employee Engagement, and Experience.

Besides working for Cairn Oil and Gas – a leading Oil and Gas producer, as CHRO – Growth, Devavrat is also handling Compensation and Benefits Performance Management. 

At Cairn, he has worked across the lengths and breadths of the organization, interacting across the hierarchies from Chairman to the workers. He joined Vedanta in 2019 as a part of its coveted Vedanta Leadership Development Program (VLDP). His first assignment was as the Business Analyst for the Vedanta Group CHRO, where he supported her by supervising and strengthening HR systems and processes through quantitative and qualitative analysis. 

In the short journey of one and a half years in this role, he was fortunate enough to drive and be a part of several key initiatives across the ~1,00,000-employee-strong group. Some of these initiatives ranged from • HR Systems implementation and digitization • HR policies and R&R strategies • HR analytics, and • Organizational transformation

As the Convener of the HR Executive Committee, Devavrat closely coordinated with the CEOs and CHROs across the Group companies to enable effective decision-making backed by evidence and data through periodic HR reviews. In 2020, when Vedanta moved from a CEO-led decision-making structure to a Management Committee (ManCom) led decision-making structure, he spearheaded the transition as Vertical Head for Management in Place (MIP), acting as an interface between the businesses, central management team and promoters of the company. This transformation led to the formation of 10 Business ManComs and 9 Functional ManComs, defining the management way of working for the organization. 

Digitalization is a way of working at Vedanta, so much so that it forms one of the seven pillars that drive the organizational philosophy. As part of digitalization, he led the creation of five critical dashboards to track organizational performance, the highlight of them being the Chairman DashboardThis gives a one-click snapshot of the corporate overview to the top management, including workforce statistics (headcount, cost etc.) and a view of 100+ key leaders across the organization

Devavrat moved to the oil and gas business, Cairn, in 2021, into cross-functional operations roles to contribute more. He served on ground operations for an additional year and a half. In his current role as CHROGrowthDevavrat leads HR for 280+ employees across the Growth business unit and corporate functions. He also leads the verticals of performance management, policies, process excellence and job rotation as an internal COE for 1500+ employees across Cairn.