ONGC Has a New Director (Finance), Pomila Jaspal

In a significant movement, ONGC Limited, the country’s premier oil and gas explorer has appointed a women to the top finance position in the firm for the first time. Pomila Jaspal, who joins Alka Mittal, the acting chairperson as well as Director (HR) at the Rs 68,000 crore (FY 2021) behemoth.

Jaspal has been a careerist at ONGC,  having joined the organisation as finance and accounts officer back in 1985.

Before this role, she was serving as Director (Finance) at refining subsidiary Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited for ONGC.

Pomila Jaspal was picked by the PESB (Public Enterprises Selection Board) in December last year and has now formally taken over after approval by the Cabinet Committee on Appointments. She is a fellow member and gold medalist at the Institute of Cost Accountants of India.

She has 36 years of experience across varied segments of the oil &gas industry, encompassing operating, regulatory and policy aspects of upstream and downstream industry. She was instrumental in the merger of OMPL with MRPL, paving the way for synergy and integration benefits for the ONGC Group, the company statement said.

Besides working in ONGC Videsh Ltd where she handled finance of various assets like Sakhalin, South Sudan, Kazakhstan, and Colombia and steered the buyout of Azerbaijan Asset, Jaspal also worked at the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) – the regulatory arm of the ministry in its formative years and was instrumental in developing the model production sharing contracts (PSC), the statement said. Jaspal also worked in the Contract Cell of the ministry, with exposure to different areas of gas pricing, gas utilisation policy, and formulation of policies for smooth implementation of PSCs and monitoring the royalty and profit petroleum, it added.

While the role is clearly gender agnostic, the redressal of the balance somewhat by the addition of women in a heavily male dominated ipper echelon across the Hydrocarbon sector is a good sign for positive change.

Importantly, firms like ONGC that are heavily invested in the Hydrocarbon supply chain need to at least start preparing for long term plans that must include meeting ESG requirements as well as more existential issues of their main business over the next 30 years.