| Syngenta India
Syngenta India
Syngenta India is the mothership company in India and in the business of seeds and crop protection products. The company is part of a global conglomerate headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. Our team structure is flat, everyone reports directly to the head legal. Lawyers Tarun Bhalla and Jitesh Dhingra are assigned as per business units – seeds and Crop Protection. Our senior company secretary, Arundhati Kulkarni, is responsible for the secretarial matters of Syngenta India, a public unlisted entity; and the litigation manager, Nikhil Nikam, handles a heavy load of about 450 civil, criminal and consumer litigations in addition to hundreds of notices. All lawyers and company secretaries are tasked with compliance education, awareness and training responsibilities apart from our core offerings. Company secretary Nimisha Tengshey and paralegal, Rajnikant Salve are also key members for the team. Another affiliate is the global delivery centre for global Finance, HR and IT operations with two centres in Pune. This venture along with our R&D centre in Goa is also supported by the legal, secretarial and compliance members.
The remedy divestment of Syngenta assets post divestment ordered by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) as a result of Syngenta’s merger with ChemChina in a multi-billion deal, with an India impact. A complex capital reduction case presently sub-judice before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) is being driven by the legal team. About 450 consumer, civil and criminal litigations in several courts in India are also managed in-house with high number of successful outcomes. Our legal team is also the guardian for legal compliance and code of conduct training, education and awareness of all our 4,000 odd staff. We conduct current state assessments and audits of our facilities ensuring a highly compliant Syngenta and vendor eco-system. Training, education is a very big part of what we do in the code of conduct compliance arena. Legal also owns enterprise risk management coordination and driving GDPR specific controls implementation in our global delivery centre at Pune under our risk management program. Working closely with our regulatory team, our team was recently involved with other association members to drive industry interest issues with positive results. Our head legal was recently nominated to lead the legal committee of CropLife India (CLI), a division of CLI International with its members representing crop protection companies spread across 91 countries. Our product security and brand enforcement programme is instrumental in driving out infringers and counterfeiters out of business. We recently settled a patent infringement matter; and a seeds parental line infringement case with competitors that generated damages and royalty revenue for Syngenta. These initiatives were driven by legal in collaboration with other internal stakeholders with optimal use of prominent Indian law firms. The news of these enforcement drives has travelled far and quick and discouraged many fence sitters and potential infringers to rethink their growth strategy at the cost of Syngenta.
Our industry is highly regulated and is dependent on weather, market dynamics, local and global regulatory climate. In recent years, events such as delayed rains, drought, pest pressure, GST implementation, demonetisation and farm sector directed regulatory changes have been challenging requiring us to innovate to maintain our business momentum and growth.
Syngenta in India aspires to be an industry leader in both crop protection and seeds. We have interesting new products and technologies that can benefit our customers, farmer community and consumers. Our initiatives on digital, online platforms and investment on tools to drive market reach and channel extension initiatives is yielding results that will lead the way to a better and profitable future. We are focussing on increasing our bottom line with cost efficiency models and fast track recoveries to supplement working capital requirements and P&L impacting activities. Legal is driving projects that reduce risk, create value and reduce cost.
We have introduced a cloud based legal compliance solution provider for auditing our facilities, track compliance outcomes, real time management reporting and update on ever changing regulatory and legal requirements. This has resulted in creating a compliant Syngenta and tangible cost saving with a positive impact on Syngenta reputation. We are also in the process of implementing a case reporting, tracking and management tool for our 450 odd court cases and hundreds of notices that we handle each year. Our trend spotting and analytics is all manually done and has yielded preventive and proactive litigation avoidance and ensured our license to operate remains intact. Cost savings have been a positive collateral. This has encouraged us, and we have in turn convinced our local and global management to allow us to explore and extend capabilities further. The new tool we believe will help us drive better value and contribute to our legal team brand.
We believe in an open and transparent culture where effort is acknowledged and achievement is celebrated. This means an outcome driven culture is the norm. Respect for the individual and doing what comes naturally for maximum impact is how we divide ourselves at work. If someone is gifted with leadership abilities they are a natural fit to drive special projects. Others may be more suited to drive longer gestation actions that do not have defined outcome but rather focus on creating long term and sustainable value – the goal of creating a “compliance culture” is such an example. We are good as a team at identifying these personal and professional attributes and preferences. The team bonds well and is generally visible across stakeholder lines and functions. We are seen, heard and respected. The head legal represents that legal, compliance, secretarial and corporate security functions on the country leadership team. Individuals representing these functions are able to collaborate seamlessly to give the country leadership insights on the challenges, risks and opportunities and provide them information to make decisions that are good for our business and people.