Praveen Chakravarty is Member of Parliament of the Indian National Congress representing the state of Tamil Nadu in the Upper House.

After an engineering degree from BITS Pilani, Praveen Chakravarty worked with IBM and Microsoft. Later he got an MBA from Wharton and worked on Wall Street.

A desire for public service led Chakravarty to join the Dr. Manmohan Singh government in 2009, first with the Unique Identity program and then with the Prime Minister’s Skills Mission.

After the 2014 elections, he became a scholar in a think-tank and published papers in peer-reviewed journals, articles in leading Indian and international publications.

In 2017, Chakravarty became a full time politician when was invited to formally join the Congress party by then President, Rahul Gandhi.

He currently chairs two departments of the party – the Professionals’ wing and Data Analytics.

He is a key member of the Congress’ economic think tank and helped draft the party’s manifestos for the 2024 and 2019 national elections.

In 2025, Chakravarty joined the faculty of Ashoka University as a Visiting Professor.

In 2026, as the convenor of the Expert Group for the state of Telangana’s caste census data he helped formulate the Composite Backwardness Index (CBI), a first of its kind.

Chakravarty is a prolific op-ed writer, an active tennis player and a Karnatic music aficionado