Airtel's Jagbir Singh quits the company; Abhay Sarvargaonkar appointed new CTO

Jagbir Singh, the chief technology officer (CTO) and director, Network Services Group at Bharti Airtel Ltd has left the company. Post his exit, Abhay Sarvargaonkar has been appointed the new CTO of Airtel.

Prior to being elevated to the post of CTO, Sarvargaonkar was the chief of operations, Network Services Group at the company. He has been with Airtel since 2006 and was responsible for the telco's network operations across all its verticals. Prior to that, he was the chief marketing officer at Lucent Technologies. He holds a bachelor of engineering degree in electronics and communications engineering from Rani Durgavati Vishwavidyalaya.

Singh has over 24 years of experience across both the wireless and wire-line domains of telecom. He had joined the telecom giant Airtel back in 2001, only to leave the company in 2010 for a brief stint with Reliance Communications as its president – technology and networks. He later joined back Airtel in 2011. He holds an M.Tech degree in Microwave from Agra University and had earlier worked at companies like Lucent Technologies (merged with Alcatel SA) and Nortel.

Earlier this month, Anand Chandrasekaran, who recently quit as senior director (global search products) at Yahoo, had joined Airtel as its chief product officer. In his new role, Chandrasekaran will lead product conceptualization, design and development across the consumer segment of Airtel.

In the past few months, Airtel has witnessed a number of high-level exits.

Last month, Sukesh Jain, chief marketing officer of Airtel's enterprise business had quit the company. Around the same time, Nikesh Arora, senior vice president and chief business officer at Google, had resigned from Bharti Airtel's board. He was replaced by Dinesh Kumar Mittal, a former department of financial services, Ministry of Finance, Government of India official.

In Jan this year, Manoj Kohli had also relinquished his position as managing director and CEO (international) at Airtel. He continues to be on the board of Bharti Airtel as nonexecutive director and was appointed as the Chairman of Bharti Airtel International (Netherlands) BV that owns telecom operations in Africa. Prior to that, Jai Menon, chief information officer (CIO) at Airtel had exited the company amidst allegations of violating its code of conduct.