Arvind Thakkar — Senior Manager, Contracts & Commercial
Hyderabad, Telangana
Contracts and commercial lead on large infrastructure projects, twelve years in the sector and eight of them on the contracts side after starting as a site engineer. Recovered ₹31 crore in time-extension and variation claims across three EPC packages, every one settled at conciliation without reaching arbitration.
Experience
Senior Manager, Contracts & Commercial, Vindhya Infratech · June 2021 – present
Owns contract administration for a ₹2,400 crore highways and water portfolio. Leads a team of five.
- Recovered ₹31 crore in extension-of-time and variation claims across three FIDIC-based EPC packages, all settled at conciliation without arbitration.
- Rewrote the subcontract suite onto back-to-back payment and indemnity terms, ending about ₹4 crore a year of unrecoverable pass-through cost.
- Released 46 expired and duplicate bank guarantees the projects had left outstanding, cutting carrying cost by ₹1.1 crore a year.
- Chairs the monthly commercial review with project directors; claim notices now leave inside the 28-day contractual window on 94% of events, up from 52%.
Manager, Contracts & Claims, Ekanth Constructions · April 2017 – May 2021
- Prepared the ₹19 crore delay claim on a metro viaduct package, including the as-planned versus as-built analysis the tribunal relied on in awarding 71%.
- Negotiated 140 vendor and subcontract agreements a year, moving 80% onto a standard template and cutting execution time from 26 days to 11.
- Set up the correspondence register that ended a pattern of unanswered engineer’s instructions; the package closed with no time-bar objection raised.
Site Engineer, then Assistant Manager (Contracts), Neelkanth Projects · July 2014 – March 2017
- Measured and certified works worth ₹56 crore across two road packages with no measurement dispute raised by the client’s engineer.
- Moved into contracts after quantifying a ₹3.2 crore rate-variation entitlement the site team had written off as unrecoverable.
Education
- Post Graduate Diploma Corporate Laws and Management · Indian Law Institute, New Delhi · July 2018 – June 2019
- B.E. Civil Engineering · College of Engineering, Pune · July 2010 – May 2014
Skills
- Contract administration: FIDIC Red and Yellow Book, EPC and item-rate contracts, Variations and EOT, Bank guarantees, Contract closeout
- Commercial: Claim quantification, Delay analysis, Vendor negotiation, Risk registers, Cost-to-complete review
- Dispute avoidance: Conciliation, Dispute adjudication boards, Arbitration support, Notice discipline, Correspondence control
- Systems: SAP MM, Primavera P6, Excel cost modelling, Document management
Certifications
- Contract and Commercial Management — Advanced Practitioner — World Commerce & Contracting
- FIDIC Contracts: Management and Administration — International Federation of Consulting Engineers