- Current role
- Chief Human Resources Officer
- Company
- Girija Industries
- Experience
- 24 years
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Based
- Pune
About
Vikram Shetty leads human resources at Girija Industries, an auto-components manufacturer with eleven plants across western and southern India and a workforce of roughly 18,000, about two-thirds of it on the shop floor.
He has spent his entire career in manufacturing HR, beginning as a plant personnel officer in Aurangabad in 2002. That grounding shapes an unfashionable view of the function: he argues that most corporate HR transformation programmes fail in industrial businesses because they are designed for the four hundred people in the head office and then announced to the eighteen thousand who are not.
At Girija he negotiated a five-year wage settlement across seven unionised plants in 2025 without a stoppage, and has since been rebuilding the company’s apprentice pipeline after a decade of contract-labour dependence.
Leadership perspective
- Why do HR transformations fail on the shop floor?
- Because they are written in a language the shop floor does not speak, and then translated badly. If your engagement survey needs an explainer, it is measuring reading comprehension.
- What did the 2025 settlement teach you?
- That the negotiation starts about four years before anybody sits at the table. By the time you are in the room, you are collecting on trust you either built or did not.