Who is IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Intel engineer who founded BPL Mobiles before joining politics

Meet Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics & IT, Skill Development & Entrepreneurship. He has been a BJP MP in the Rajya Sabha for three terms, representing Karnataka. He was an independent MP for 12 years before joining the BJP in 2018. He played a key role in the Kerala and Karnataka elections as vice president and media head of the NDA respectively. He started his career as an engineer in India, but left his job to pursue further studies in the US. There, he worked at Intel and was part of an important project. He came back to India and became an entrepreneur.

Chandrashekhar was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, but traveled widely across the country as his father was an Air Force pilot. She had a varied childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, traveling across her home country and learning about different cultures.

engineer and entrepreneur

Chandrasekhar graduated as an engineer from Manipal Institute of Technology in 1981. He moved to the United States for further studies and obtained a master’s degree in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Chicago. Chandrasekhar’s life began in 1985 when he joined Intel’s 486 project, a 42-byte processor, as part of the Silicon Valley team that was laying the foundation for the IT revolution. He was selected by Vinod Dham from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

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He returned to India in 1991 to marry the daughter of TPG Nambiar, the founder of BPL. On his return, Chandrasekhar founded BPL Mobile, which became the largest cellular network in the country. He sold his shares in BPL Mobile to the Essar Group in 2005 for $1.1 billion. He founded Jupiter Capital, a private equity firm, in 2006 and served as its chairman until 2014.

He is also a philanthropist and the founder-trustee of the Namma Bengaluru Foundation, a non-profit organization. He owns assets in the media, hospitality, technology and entertainment sectors.

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Conflict with father-in-law TPG Nambiar

He has also been a part of controversies. In 2004, TPG Nambiar, the patriarch of the BPL group, and his father-in-law sued Rajeev for mismanagement in the company and irregularities in the ownership structure, and asked the court to stop Chandrasekhar from selling or transferring BPL Mobiles without their approval. . Nambiar alleged that he had surreptitiously increased his stake in the company. In his defence, Chandrasekhar had said that all transactions were above board. The two reached an out-of-court financial settlement over BPL Communications.