ET Awards 2013: Curtains about to go up on India Inc's biggest corporate awards

NEW DELHI: Curtains are about to go up on India Inc's biggest corporate awards, the ET Awards For Corporate Excellence 2012-13. The event to honour the best is about to begin shortly.

ET adopted a democratic, participative and rigorous process to choose the best and the brightest of India Inc. In an elaborate two-step exercise, the selection process began with number crunching done by the ET Intelligence Group (ETIG). In some categories, parameters were set by ETIG to shortlist the candidates.

Tune in to track the keynote address by chief guest Finance Minister P Chidambaram. Also on the agenda is a high-powered panel discussion comprising Prithviraj Chavan, Nandan Nilekani, Deepak Parekh, Rahul Bajaj, Chanda Kochhar and Rishad Premji. They will discuss 'Rebooting India — 2014 & beyond'.

Wipro Chairman Azim Premji — the man who's signed Bill Gates & Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge — will speak at the ET Awards for the first time on the Act of Giving, a subject ET has championed.

Catch Deepika Padukone adding to the glitter of the ET Awards 2013 ceremony with her superstar and celebrity brand status. India's Chennai Express has a surprise package in store.

The winners - Azim Premji, L&T, Chidambaram, Sachin Bansal, KM Birla, Sun Pharma, BookMyShow and Vinod Khosla - have been chosen by an eight-person jury. These winners, and others, were selected through a rigorous process followed by the ET jury. Anshu Jain, the chairman, asked members to shortlist two candidates from each category.

The merits of the first and second ranked nominees were then subjected to intense scrutiny, with jury members also asking hard questions of the ET representatives. The intention was to reach a consensus on the eventual winner and failing that, to select a winner by majority vote.

Besides Jain and Birla, the other jury members were KV Kamath, chairman of ICICI Bank; Harish Manwani, chief operating officer of Unilever Plc; Aditya Puri, managing director of HDFC Bank; Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India; Mallika Srinivasan, chairman and chief executive of Tafe; and Shailendra Singh, managing director of Sequoia Capital.