H.E. Rajeev Chandrasekhar

H.E. Rajeev Chandrasekhar is the State President of Bharatiya Janata Party Kerala, and a former member of PM Narendra Modi’s Council of Ministers in India. He was Minister of State from July 2021 to June 2024 for Electronics and Information Technology; Skill Development & Entrepreneurship; and Jal Shakti.

Rajeev’s initiatives as Minister included designing the Digital Privacy framework with the Indias Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, Policies for and leading the Semiconductor Mission for India, Policies to catalyse India’s Electronics manufacturing into a presence in the Global value chain, Deep Tech and Electronics systems/products, AI, Digital Government and policy and rules for user rights and an Open, Safe & Trusted, Accountable Internet in India. Rajeev was also instrumental in formulating the ‘IndiaAI Policy’, which has at its core the use of AI to solve real use cases that can transform and impact people’s lives.

Rajeev earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and an MS in Computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He began his Tech career as a Software Engineer building Screen Manager Software for one of India’s earliest Tech companies Softech and then in the United States, working as a Design Engineer and CPU Architect at Intel on the 80486 and Pentium microprocessors and worked on Microcomputers, early Internet, compilers, and Unix operating systems. In the early 1990s, he returned to India to begin to build up one of India’s earliest and largest mobile cellular networks, BPL Mobile which he successfully exited at USD 1.1Billion+ as India’s first Tech Unicorn in 2005 to Hutchinson, now Vodafone.