Become core to the business process: Reliance Ind’s Rohit Bansal to the communications world

“Founders need someone who can save their time. We cannot limit ourselves to pushing press releases… we have to be core to the business process,” remarked Rohit Bansal, group head, communications, Reliance Industries at afaqs! CommuniCon. In its second edition, the conference discusses the changing facets of communications.

Speaking to Sreekant Khandekar, co-founder and CEO, afaqs!, Bansal told the folks at the conference they must know the business in and out and if they stay in silos and speak only to the communications industry, “we are out to be outmoded by technology that is making a commodity out of the some of the work we are doing.”

He was speaking to Khandekar over a session titled: Communication Beyond Boundaries: Inspiring a New Era of Storytelling.

Bansal has spent nearly 11 years at Reliance Industries and was interviewed by Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani at Maker Chambers in Mumbai. “My interview was a monologue of seven minutes, nothing else,” he remarks.

He thought he was meeting an old friend who was also the head of human resources at Reliance, but he ended up meeting the chairman. “He held my hand and spoke non-stop for seven minutes,” states Bansal. Ambani spoke about being consumer-facing, taking over Network18, and Jio.

After expressing his thoughts, Ambani exited the room, but not before informing Bansal, "One thing is important: you've got to survive my crazy ways for 90 days." Those 90 days have now crossed a decade.

Bansal believes founders possess an acute ability to understand what they need, and “when they see a person, they’re able to connect immediately and define the job.”

As the conversation moved to the size of Reliance Industries and how Bansal perceives it in the context of communication, he was clear: “It’s not about how big but about how human a company is.”

Bansal spoke about setting up a 5G tower at Siachen which allows a soldier to enjoy high-quality video calls with his loved ones, or how elephants are taken care of at Vantara, the company’s animal sanctuary in Gujarat.

He made an interesting point about how Reliance would take such stories to the likes of the Times of India or Economic Times, but they’d treat them as soft stories and would then promptly move to talk about hard business stories.

But the social media revolution came to the conglomerate’s rescue. “We used LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter (now X), and Instagram to our collective advantage—videos, short formats—it assisted us in omnichannel communication. The earned media and owned media started talking to each other,” explained Bansal.

Adding to this, he discussed the sharing economy and how everybody today shares, mostly without putting thought into what they’re forwarding. Seeing its ubiquity and increasing spread, he urged communication folks to keep an eye on it as the session wrapped up.