After an engineering degree from BITS Pilani, Praveen Chakravarty worked with IBM in Japan, Taiwan, US and then moved to Microsoft as a Product Manager. Later, he got an MBA and went to Wall Street with Thomas Weisel Partners and then ran BNP Paribas’ investment banking business in India. He co-founded India’s first angel investing group and has served on many corporate boards including the Bombay Stock Exchange and the Securities Board of India.

A desire for public service led Chakravarty to join the Dr. Manmohan Singh government’s Unique Identity program, tasked with financial inclusion of the unbanked poor. He then worked with the Prime Minister’s Skills Mission and implemented a voucher-based skilling program to train 100 million unemployed youth. After the Congress party lost power, he joined IDFC Institute, a think tank as a scholar in Political Economy where he published papers in peer-reviewed journals, articles in Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg, leading Indian newspapers and had citations in The Economist, Financial Times and New York Times.

In 2017, Chakravarty was invited to formally join the Congress party by then President, Rahul Gandhi. He currently chairs two departments of the party – Professionals’ wing of 20,000 members and Data Analytics for data driven decision making and works very closely with the leadership. He ran a digital drive to enroll 25 million voters and helped conduct internal elections to choose the party President. He has traveled to more than half of all districts in India and organised election campaigns.

 
As a key member of the Congress’ economic think tank, he helped shape the party’s economic vision. For the 2019 elections manifesto, he designed a minimum income program called NYAY (Justice) with experts including Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee, Thomas Piketty and others. He also co-drafted the manifesto for the Congress party for the 2024 national elections. He is a respected voice in India’s policy sphere and has co-authored opinion articles with former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, among several others.

Chakravarty is working on two books, one on Economic Justice and other on India’s Federalism. He is a prolific op-ed writer, an active tennis and cricket player, a South Indian classical music aficionado, an enthusiastic cook and an ardent advocate of caste justice.