Ashok Singh Bais is a Mechanical Engineer.

He is a management trainee from Bata where he has gone through a two years on the job training in all the facets of leather and shoe manufacturing in the beginning of his nine years stint in the company.

For four years thereafter he was associated with Tata Exports - Dewas now Tata International with varied exposure in the Shoe industry from developing of ancillaries to setting up of the shoe project.

He came down to South of India in the year 1983 to set up Ponds India's Leather business from Pondicherry and was heading Uni Lever's Indian Leather operations prior to leaving after eleven years with the group.

He headed ECCOLET SKO Denmark's Indian operations as its Technical Director for three years mainly responsible for resourcing of around 2 million pairs of Shoe Uppers.

In his association since 1997 with TFL, one of the World's top Leather chemical companies dealing exclusively with Leather Chemicals, currently he heads the operations of its Wholly owned subsidiary in India .

Mr.Bais has been on the panel of experts nominated by Indian Shoe Federation during the Shoe components fair in Chennai. He is also an individual member of the National Institute on Quality and Reliability and played a major role in leading one of his teams manufacturing Shoe Uppers in Ponds to get ISO 9002 certification.

Gautham Gopalakrishna holds a masters degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is currently a scientist with the Central Leather Research Institute (CLRI) , Chennai. He is a member of the Indian Society of Biomechanics and American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

His areas of interest and expertise are Computer Aided Design applications in footwear and Computational Biomechanics. He has presented papers in over 40 leading national and international conferences and seminars apart from having published papers in several professional journals. He has authored a book "Basics of Computer Science" and contributed chapters in two books on computational Biomechanics. He holds a patent and has filed for a copyright in the areas of computational Biomechanics.

R.Sriram is a chemical engineer (a graduate from A.C.College of technology, Chennai) and has been serving the Indian chemical industry in different capacities. His work experience spans a wide spectrum of sectors in the chemical process industry - fertilizers, heavy chemicals, polymers, engineering and management, consultancy, and has held various positions in productions, technical services, project management, marketing of capital goods and tuning computing services. He had the opportunity to be associated with the growth of environmental engineering industry over the last decade and has handled a couple of assignments specifically for the leather industry on a turnkey solution provider. His last assignment for a common effluent treatment facility that has been set up in phase II of sidco industrial estate - Ranipet.

He shares the concern of many a NGO on the import of pollution on everyone’s life and believes that only concerted efforts of everyone, be it the Govt., the industry bodies, individual industrial units, NGOs can set the stage for harmonious marriage between industrial development and a clearer environment.