Ruby Thapar
Across roles and sectors, Ruby Thapar has occupied the same pressure point: between the reality of what an organisation does and how it accounts for it. Over three decades — across extractive industries, global chemical companies, and heavy equipment multinationals — that position has been constant, from building grassroots programmes to advising CEOs and boards.
At Vedanta Group, Dow Chemical, Caterpillar India, and Aditya Birla Group, her work sat at the intersection of corporate affairs, sustainability, and social impact. Much of it happened inside the room where impact is made, measured, and reported. What it made visible — with uncomfortable clarity — is how easily that reporting shifts towards reassurance rather than rigour.
She co-founded the Impact Assessment and Accreditation Forum (IAAF) to build a principled framework that helps organisations learn from their own work, holding diversity rather than flattening it into uniformity.
Her work in the development sector, from early years on the ground to her current board role at ACCESS Development Services, holds a different lens: one where impact is experienced, not framed. That perspective — of communities who are assessed, not organisations who assess — is not a counterpoint to her corporate experience. It is the same question asked from the other end of the chain.
Her practice as a leadership coach adds another dimension: the discipline of asking the question that surfaces what is really true, particularly when the room would prefer comfort. In governance, that habit is not a soft skill. It is the work.
At IAAF, Ruby brings what three decades at that pressure point produce — the grassroots understanding, the corporate interior, the governance instinct, the coaching rigour — in service of a single purpose: ensuring that accreditation becomes a tool for honest reflection.