Prithviraj Chavan
Member of Parliament
Party: Indian National Congress (INC)

C- 403, Swarna Jayanti Sadan
M S FlatDr. Bishambar Das Marg
New Delhi-110 001Phone: 91-11- 23327374

Mr. Chavan, a member of the Rajya Sabha from Maharashtra, is the Minister of State in-charge of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) in the present Government. He earlier served as a Member of the Lok Sabha in 1991, 1996 and 1998 and served on many important Parliamentary Committees in the area of Public Finance, Public Enterprises, International Trade, Energy and Technology. He is, currently, Member, Standing Committee on Finance and the Consultative Committee on Defence.

Mr. Chavan has held many important party positions. He has served as the deputy chief whip of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) and as the elected Secretary of the CPP. He was member of the Party's Economic Review Committee and the Introspection Committee, which analysed the Party's performance in the 1999 National Election. Mr. Chavan is presently the Co-chairman of the Congress Party's Department of Policy Planning and Co-ordination.

Mr. Chavan has majored in Mechanical Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani, and the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked in the US aerospace industry as a research engineer for four years designing airborne, video and instrumentation recorders used in military aircraft, manufactured by Boeing and Lockheed. On his return to India, Mr. Chavan co-founded the Applied Electro-Magnetics P Ltd., (AEM), an ISO 9000 company to develop defence electronic equipment and special purpose computers. Over the years, his company has developed many systems for use in Air Defense Network, Anti-Submarine Warfare, digital communications, GPS hardware and special test equipments for Russian aircrafts.

Mr. Chavan has also contributed significantly to the research in the field of computing in Indian Languages. He was a visiting professor at BITS, Pilani; and was a member of the Council of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
Mr. Chavan has traveled extensively and has been a part of many Parliamentary delegations, including the first ever Indian Parliamentary delegation to Pakistan and has also been a member of many Congress Party delegations.