Panel will find my successor in good time: Narayana Murthy

Infosys Technologies chairman and chief mentor N R Narayana Murthy, who is set to retire in August next year, said on Tuesday the company would get a suitable successor well before his retirement; and a nominations committee led by Cornell University professor and Infosys board member Jeffrey Sean Lehman will decide on his successor at an appropriate time.

"We have a nominations committee. Jeffrey Lehman is the chairman of that. Certainly, he and his committee will come up with a successor in time so that I can retire on 20 August 2011," Murthy said at an event in Delhi. The nominations committee oversees the company's nomination process for the top level management.

Murthy will turn 65 on 20 August next year. This has prompted the hunt for his replacement. The succession plan for Murthy, head of India's second biggest information technology company, comes at a time when India's leading business house the Tata Group has also begun a search for a successor to chairman Ratan Tata, who retires in December 2012.

Infosys' nominations committee, which has ICICI Bank non-executive chairman KV Kamath and former HDFC Standard Life Insurance chief executive Deepak Satwalekar as its members apart from Lehman, has been assigned the responsibility to appoint the successor. ''I am sure they will do an excellent job,'' Murthy told media persons on the sidelines of a conference on public governance organised by the All India Management Association.

The committee already has had five meetings in the year that ended March 2010, three more than what is required under the company rules.

The purpose of the committee is to oversee the company's nomination process for the top level management and identify, screen and review individuals qualified to serve as executive directors, non-executive directors and independent directors.