India’s director of WhatsApp’s public policy The director of public policy for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in India will be Shivnath Thukral. 

Abhijit Bose, the head of WhatsApp India, and Rajiv Aggarwal, the director of public policy at Meta Facebook India, both announced their resignations from their positions on Tuesday.

“At the start of covid, the world rapidly moved online, and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” Zuckerberg said in a blog post then.

In India, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp or WhatsApp Messenger director of public policy, Shivnath Thukral, will assume leadership of the position. The company did not name a replacement for Bose.

In a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, he said he is “really excited” about his next role: “After a small break, I plan to rejoin the entrepreneurial world.”

According to Bose, the decision to leave after four years “has not been an easy one”. He added, though, that the move was planned for a while, but the announcement was held back due to last week’s layoffs at Meta. “We wanted to hold this back so we could focus on supporting those impacted last week,” he added.

The departures of Bose and Aggarwal occur at a time when Meta is terminating workers from its international operations. On November 9, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the firm would be firing more than 11,000 employees worldwide, or around 13% of its total workforce.

Asia-Pacific division. However, the employees of Meta in India have not been affected by the ongoing tech layoffs as much as those of the microblogging service Twitter. Six days prior to Zuckerberg’s announcement, Ajit Mohan, the CEO of Meta India, had announced his resignation in order to become the president of Snap Inc.’s Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, thanked Bose for his “entrepreneurial drive” as the first head of WhatsApp India.

“There is so much more WhatsApp can do for India, and we’re excited to continue helping advance India’s digital transformation,” Cathcart said.

Manish Chopra, director of partnerships at Meta, India, too, thanked Bose for his “proactive engagement with critical policy and regulatory stakeholders”, a role that Thukral will now perform.