Political economist and senior fellow at the IDFC Institute Praveen Chakravarty was appointed as the head of the Congress party’s Data Analytics Department, Rahul Gandhi announced on Twitter on 5 February, Monday.
“Excited to announce a ‘Data Analytics’ dept under the leadership of Praveen Chakravarty to effectively use ‘Big Data’,” the Congress President wrote on the micro-blogging website.
Gandhi also renamed the Computer Department of the All India Congress Committee as the Data Analytics Department, a press release from the party said.
Chakravarty, an alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and Wharton School, Philadelphia, is a former investment banker and an angel investor.
He worked with technology majors like IBM and Microsoft in the early stages of his career, before moving to US-based investment banking entity Thomas Wiesel. Two years later in a high profile move, Chakravarty joined as the Managing Director of BNP Paribas.
The Data Analytics Department will not be his first venture associated with the Congress party. In 2010, he left BNP Paribas to join United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government’s Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) project
Chakravarty serves on corporate boards of startups like InMobi, mSwipe and few more and is the founding trustee at IndiaSpend.
Chakravarty’s opinion pieces are published in various news media including The Quint and BloombergQuint.
After over a year of contributing a monthly column — Noise To Signal — Chakravarty joined BloombergQuint as contributing editor last year. Following Monday’s announcement, Chakravarty will be stepping down from his role as contributing editor at BloombergQuint but will continue his monthly column.
You can read his articles on The Quint here.
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