Suparna Mitra and I decide to meet at one of the many delectable dives that dot upscale Indiranagar in Bengaluru. She plumps for a place with a name appropriate for these times, Dongle Café. I’m early for our 6 pm meeting and choose a table for two in a narrow balcony outside the noisy air-conditioned area, where many work furiously on their laptops. A huge jackfruit tree frames the balcony; the chirps of birds and raucous caws of crows rent the air, muting the sounds of the street traffic below.

I order a green jasmine tea and a rosemary thyme cookie while I wait for the MD and CEO of TeamLease, one of the country’s largest staffing companies. Mitra joined in February this year after a 24-year career in Titan Co, including five as CEO of the watches and wearables division, while the co-founders of TeamLease, Manish Sabharwal and Ashok Reddy, transitioned roles 25 years after the company started — Reddy as executive vice chairman and Sabharwal as a non-independent director.

Mitra arrives for our tete-a-tete. It’s a bit of an odd time before dinner, so she prefers not to eat and asks for a blueberry juice with chia seeds. I ask her about her transition from Titan onto a very different assignment. She explains, “In my initial discussions with Manish and Ashok, I was really quite impressed by their entrepreneurial ability as well as their focus on the mission, which was about putting India to work. While they were busy doing this, in the last 25 years I was working in Titan… There are so many things that you learn in a fine company like Titan. And then you come out and see a world outside which is also very interesting. It was a good moment because I was also keen on learning something about a completely new category. Obviously, I’ve never worked in staffing or even in an HR services company — the way it runs, its rhythm, the type of clients — and this is B2B. I had always done B2C all my career. So it’s been a big learning for me.”

She reels off mind-boggling figures. TeamLease has 3.5 lakh people on its rolls, of which 2,500 work for the company while the rest work for other companies. TL manages their payroll, compliance, PF, gratuity, and often the hiring itself. In FY 25-26, TeamLease had revenues of ₹11,860 crore and handled over 4,000 clients.

“I’ve been reading business papers for the longest time. Earlier, I used to only look at the retail articles or marketing or B2C businesses. Now I read end-to-end because literally everybody is a client or a potential client. It could be auto, BFSI, manufacturing, logistics, e-commerce, quick commerce, to see what trends are happening,” elaborates Mitra.

Sipping her blueberry drink slowly, Mitra explains that in TeamLease there is something called general staffing — a very large part of the 3.5 lakh people — which is a lot of entry-level sales or retail store staff across companies. “But we also have something called specialised staffing, which is really a lot of both IT as well as other specialised skills; it could be from finance to legal people. We do a lot of work with GCCs. It’s really booming; there are 120-plus GCCs that we work with,” she adds.

TeamLease, she says, has a very large operations team as the salaries of so many people need to go out every month. And at any point, TL is hiring about 20,000 people per month. “So everything from the offer letter to the associate to the final settlement and everything else in-between needs to be managed. We had our employee rewards about a few weeks back, and one of those in the operations team that got rewarded was in charge of processing 5 lakh Form 16s. Of course, it is automated, but still needs a lot of manual checking,” she explains.

A trend that is gaining ground is that both employers and employees want flexibility. Earlier generations, she says, would be in a company, or definitely in one industry, till retirement, for decades together. “So earlier, temp was a stopgap until you got a permanent job. But today, a lot of youngsters are thinking of multi-careers in multiple decades. And that level of flexibility allows many things, learning, multiple revenue streams, work-life balance. A lot of them also choose this for learning because, every time you take a new assignment, you’re learning something new. And for employers also this works, except for some very core functions,” she adds.

As the conversation swivels to Mitra’s early years, I order a Mexican grill chicken sandwich, which takes a while to arrive. Mitra’s father was an engineer with the Steel Authority of India, so she was born in the steel township of Bhilai. Her childhood was mostly spent in such steel towns and then five years in Delhi. Her parents moved to Kolkata when she was in class 11. “Growing-up years were blissful. It was small-town life at its best. I was the youngest of three sisters and I was pampered, not in material terms — that time in the 1970s nobody had anything really — but in affection. Both my parents were very progressive. Middle-class Bengali families tend to be very education- and accomplishment-oriented, and there was also a lot of freedom to pursue what you want.”

Post school Mitra attended Jadavpur University for a course in electrical engineering, but by the third year she was clear that was not what she wanted to do. IIM-Calcutta after that was transformative. “The courses in economics, sociology, psychology, behavioural sciences just blew my mind. It was a very impactful experience and, of course, all those friendships you make for life,” she explains.

Picked up from campus by HUL, she was placed in Brooke Bond, where she worked a couple of years before joining Titan in its international division in 1994. But in four years she had quit and, after a short stint in a software company, she joined Arvind Brands as business head. In 2006 Titan called her back and she joined as marketing head for Titan watches.

It starts pouring heavily, so we quickly retreat to the front verandah of the cafe. The sandwich arrives and I persuade Mitra to share it with me. During her first stint Titan had been a much smaller company, says Mitra. She was in the jewellery business and, even though relatively junior, recalls sitting in on meetings with founder MD Xerxes Desai. “It was great exposure, especially interacting with Mr Desai and understanding his thinking. I always felt that he was so European in his sensibilities. And his room was so beautiful with white sofas; and he had these Lalique sculptures, which I saw for the first time. That was all part of my education,” she says with a laugh.

When she rejoined Titan in 2006, it was a much bigger company. Bhaskar Bhat was the MD. “I was fortunate to work with a lot of iconic leaders in Titan,” she says. In the period 2006-12, there were some impactful watch launches and iconic campaigns, such as the series of ads with Aamir Khan, on which she worked closely. Then there was the relaunch of Raga, the launch of Zoop, a kids’ brand, the Titan Octane series, as well as Purple, a fashion brand.

In 2012 she was made the southern business head, handling all brands of the company. The south was the biggest region for the company and an onerous responsibility handling sales and distribution for all brands. On April 1, 2020, smack in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mitra took on the role of CEO, Watches. “My first month as the CEO I had zero sales and zero production, and I remember calling Bhaskar who, ever positive, said, “But you can only go up from here!” In 2019-20, watches sales at consumer prices had touched ₹4,000 crore; it fell 60 per cent the next year because of the Covid impact.

The watches division did a lot of work during Covid also, such as repositioning the Titan brand, making it more premium, pushing e-commerce, and refurbishing Titan World outlets. Helios, its multi-brand outlet, launched over 10 years ago, took off post Covid as premium watches found a following. “People were lapping up automatics. They were willing to pay the price. Even in Raga, every year we would launch at higher prices and the highest priced watches would get sold out,” she says.

During this period, Titan did a lot of work in premium watches on the manufacturing, materials, watch movements, plating, finishing, et al. “We had at one point 20 collaborations between Switzerland, Japan, and China to up our every process,” she adds. This also led to the ambitious project of developing Titan’s own tourbillon watch movement (designed to counter the effects of gravity on a watch’s accuracy). “Venkat (former MD) told me that the word ‘tourbillon’ is French for whirlwind. How appropriate it was as we were creating a whirlwind in the world of watches.” The limited edition Jalsa watch Titan developed with the tourbillon movement sold for approximately ₹41 lakh. Actor R Madhavan, among the first customers, wore it when he received the Padma Shri award recently. “I was so delighted and proud when I heard that.” Having set Titan firmly on the path of its premiumisation journey, Mitra moved out to pursue other interests.

Seguing, I ask her how she unwinds? “I read a lot. I do very simple things, homely kind of stuff. I go for walks, I spend a lot of time with like-minded friends, my mom, daughters.” Her reading comprises a lot of fiction, especially murder mysteries, and she says she loves Keigo Higashino’s books. “He wrote amazing books, though some of the murders are quite brutal. I just finished reading this book called Yesteryear. It’s a very interesting tale about a trad (traditional) wife. The thing about reading fiction is that it’s in my imagination, I can travel to so many different eras, types of people, situations, and I really like that.” With incessant travel, her comfort food is her home-cooked Bengali cuisine, though she does seek out new flavours on her travels.

I ask about her agenda for TeamLease. “It’s a company that is not even aware of its full impact as it just believes in quietly doing things. And I come from a company where you did good work, but you also talk about it. And I think that is something that I definitely will add. And in terms of vision, while the company has independent verticals, they all come together in providing the ‘people solutions’ for companies. So it’s really about stringing together the narrative and getting clients to fully understand all the things that we can do for them.”

On that note, we wind up our chat as Mitra has an early flight to Mumbai the next morning. We head out into the rain with a promise to catch up again soon.

Published on August 31, 2026