Snapchat parent ropes in former Amazon executive Uttara Ganesh as public policy head for India

India has been a major growth market for Snapchat.

Snapchat parent Snap Inc has appointed Uttara Ganesh as head of public policy for the India market, a region where it is witnessing significant growth of its user base in recent years. Ganesh announced this appointment on LinkedIn.

This is quite an interesting hire by Snap since Ganesh has previously served as public policy lead for the current union minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar between July 2014 and April 2017. During her stint, Chandrasekhar was however serving as an independent MP.

Ganesh joins the social media firm from Amazon, where she was leading the policy advocacy for Amazon Web Services on issues such as data governance, cloud regulation, digital taxation, content regulation, and economic policy. She also developed and executed public policy advocacy strategies for Amazon's other offerings such as Amazon Prime Video, Kindle and Alexa apart from leading policy advocacy for the tech giant in areas such as data governance, content regulation, and taxation among others.

"I'm so grateful and excited to join a team that places users at its centre, while prioritising good design and thoughtful innovation. There's a lot of listening and learning for me to do over the next several months. I will continue to be in touch with the vibrant and supremely talented tech policy community in this new role" Ganesh said in a LinkedIn post.

India has been a major growth market for the ephemeral messaging app. In May this year, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel had said that they have witnessed over 100 percent year-over-year growth in daily active users (DAUs) in each of the last five quarters. While Spiegel hadn't disclosed any specific details, Snapchat had said in February that its userbase has crossed the 60 million users in the country in the fourth quarter of 2020.

The appointment also comes after India's new IT rules came into effect on May 26, 2021, which mandates significant social media intermediaries with over 5 million users to appoint officers locally. Snap has designated its strategy and growth partnership head Juhi Bhatnagar as its resident grievance officer for the country.