Our board
Five unpaid directors govern Snehwan USA Inc. Snehwan’s own staff, in India, run the work.
The board
Snehwan USA Inc is governed by five directors, each serving a one-year term. None of us receives a salary, a fee or a commission, and none of us holds any position at Snehwan in India. The board meets every two months and approves every grant.
Sanjay Anandrao Pol
Graduated from IIT Bombay in 1982 and holds master’s degrees in mechanical engineering and computer science, along with an MBA from the University of Michigan earned while working at Ford. He spent nine years at Ford in Dearborn before moving to California, and then twenty years at Cisco Systems, retiring as a Vice President. Outside his career he has taught Bala Vihar to middle school students at Chinmaya Mission San Jose. He visited Snehwan in 2024 and saw the campus and the children for himself, and hosted Ashok Deshmane in the Bay Area in August 2026; the meetings there led directly to the formation of Snehwan USA Inc. As President he is the point of contact for donors, for the chapter leads and for Snehwan USA.
Madhusudan G Soni
A scientist specialising in nutrition and food additive safety. He earned his doctorate in India and has carried out research in India, Japan and the United States. He took up the field after seeing malnutrition and poverty-related illness in his own village as a child, and his working life has been spent on the safety of what people eat and on the diseases that follow when people cannot eat enough. Alongside his scientific career he has been active in grassroots social justice work, including Yuvak Kranti Dal. He keeps the corporate records, the minutes and the governing documents of Snehwan USA Inc.
Pramod Sathe
A Chartered Accountant in Atlanta, and the founder and chief executive of Georgia Consulting LLC. He spent fifteen years as a chief financial officer with large multinational companies before starting his own practice, and that combination shapes how he advises clients. His work covers accounting, tax and financial planning, and he has overseen complex domestic and offshore operations for clients across several industries, so cross-border structure is ordinary ground for him — which matters for an organisation whose grants go to India. He oversees the finances, the banking arrangements and the regulatory filings, is preparing our application to the IRS for recognition of exemption under section 501(c)(3), and reports to the board on the finances at every meeting.
Satish Rangnath Thopte
Chief Technology Officer at CheckAlt, where he leads technology for a payments business, with twenty-eight years of experience across payments, financial services and technology. Before CheckAlt he held senior leadership roles at Fiserv, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, Motorola, StoneRiver and Hitachi, and much of his career has been spent building and running engineering teams distributed across several countries. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Dallas–Fort Worth Maharashtra Mandal, which supports community service and leadership development, and on the board of 1464 Creations, a nonprofit working in theatre and cross-cultural programming. He reviews the bank statements and reconciliations each quarter and reports to the board.
Deepak Amarchand Lunkad
An engineer from the College of Engineering Pune, where he was named Best Outgoing Student, with an MBA from the Bauer School of Business at the University of Houston, where he received the Dean’s Award for academic excellence. He has spent more than twenty years at Emerson Automation Solutions, work that has taken him across the United States, India, France, Thailand and Saudi Arabia; he began as an engineering manager and now leads strategy execution across the business. He is a certified Project Management Professional and holds Lean Six Sigma certification. He has volunteered with Snehwan and Saptsindhu since 2004, raising funds for underprivileged children long before Snehwan USA existed.
How we govern
Not more than forty-nine per cent of the board may be interested persons, a majority of directors may not be related to one another, and no director may concurrently serve as a trustee, officer or employee of Snehwan in India. Every director completes an annual conflict of interest disclosure. Any disbursement over $1,000, and any transfer of funds outside the United States, requires the approval of both bank signatories.