Meta Platforms Inc. said on Tuesday it lost two more senior executives in India, days after the firm’s country head quit to join a rival.
(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. said on Tuesday it lost two more senior executives in India, days after the firm’s country head quit to join a rival.
Abhijit Bose, head of WhatsApp in India, and Rajiv Aggarwal, Meta’s public policy director in the country, have resigned, according to an emailed statement by Meta. The resignations come amid heightening regulatory challenges big technology firms face in the country, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government heaping compliance burden on them.
Meta said the latest exits aren’t linked to the “recent news cycles,” and pledged its commitment to India. The company, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram — some of the world’s busiest social media platforms — said earlier this month it would cut more than 11,000 jobs worldwide, equal to about 13% of its workforce, joining a spate of technology companies that have announced job reductions.
WhatsApp hired Bose, the co-founder of mobile payments company Ezetap, in 2018, when the messaging platform was trying to set up a payments business. But New Delhi’s data localization push and misinformation on the platform held back the company’s plans for years. WhatsApp has also taken the Indian government to court over demands it says will break encryption on the messaging service.
Aggarwal, a former bureaucrat in the Indian government, joined Meta’s India unit in late 2021 after leading public policy for Uber in the country for almost two years. Meta promoted Shivnath Thukral, a former journalist, to replace Aggarwal as the director for public policy in India, the statement said.
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