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India is not facing a pure supply-chain talent shortage. The sharper issue, as the ET Supply Chain roundtable suggests, is whether the industry is building the kind of leadership pipeline the next decade will require. Pankaj Aggarwal took the contrarian view that India is already producing enough talent through engineering colleges, MBA programs, and other institutions, and that supply chain fundamentally needs people with logical thinking and problem-solving ability. But the wider discussion shows that talent volume is not the same as leadership readiness.
Vinayaka Gangavathi pushed the debate in a more practical direction. His point was that building future supply-chain leaders requires more than hiring smart people. Younger professionals increasingly want exposure to technology, analytics, AI, and real business problems. When companies hire strong talent but trap them in low-value reporting work, they waste the very capability they say they need. His line was memorable for a reason: hiring talented people and then making them spend half their day creating PowerPoint slides is “like hiring a Formula 1 driver and asking him to wash the car.” He also cited bigbasket’s internal mentoring effort, Project Drona, and its dedicated in-house L&D setup as examples of what leadership development can look like when it is treated intentionally.
Samrat Sehgal added a second layer to the argument. He pointed out that India has already created quick-commerce companies that are essentially technology-enabled supply chains, and that Indian supply-chain professionals are increasingly being exported into global roles by multinational firms. That is a sign of strength, not weakness. But he also made an important caveat: supply chain is still not always the first-choice career magnet for top talent, even though the function is gaining a stronger voice in the boardroom and evolving from an execution role into a strategic business enabler.
Sunit Mukherji sharpened the capability challenge further. He argued that what India now needs is a stronger blend of techno-commercial knowledge, data analytics, digital fluency, leadership traits, and commercial acumen. In other words, the next generation of supply-chain leaders cannot be built only around functional execution. They need to be able to navigate ambiguity, lead through disruption, and make business trade-offs in increasingly volatile operating conditions.
That is the real case-study takeaway from this discussion. India appears to have enough raw talent entering the system. The unresolved question is whether companies are giving that talent the right mix of exposure, mentorship, digital capability-building, and strategic ownership to become future leaders. The risk is not that India cannot produce supply-chain talent. The risk is that the industry may underdevelop the talent it already has.
Why it matters:
The next supply-chain advantage will not come from hiring more people alone. It will come from building leaders who can combine operations, analytics, technology, and business judgment at the same time.
