Interestingly, both Ramesh and Nilekani were both excellent quizzers and were part of the 1975 Mood Indigo team at IIT Bombay.
And the silver-haired and articulate minister with a reputation as a blunt policy-maker could be the man whom Nilekani may turn to for tips, albeit in a different scenario, and he may well oblige.
Ramesh was the man Nilekani tapped when the Infosys IPO was undersubscribed in 1993. It is stated that Nilekani asked Ramesh, three years his senior in IIT, to put Rs 10,000 in the company. Ramesh didn't and calls the move “the single biggest mistake of my life”.
Saurabh Bharadwaj and Manish Sisodia, Kejriwal's ministerial colleagues, have an engineering background though not form IIT.
Bhardwaj is a B.Tech in computer science from Bharatiya Vidyapeeth College of Engineering under IP University while Sisodia did his Mechanical Engineering from Jammu.
Ironically, despite being an IITian, Ramesh, who is now the Minister for Rural Development, had kicked up a controversy claiming the faculty of the premier IITs and IIMs are ‘not world class' but are ‘excellent' because of the quality of students.
Armed with a BSc degree from Lucknow University, a B Tech from IIT, Kharagpur, and an MS from the Illinois Institute of Technology, USA, Ajit Singh worked in the US computer industry for 15 years before returning to India in 1986 to enter politics. Singh is the current Civil Aviation Minister.
Prem Das Rai, the lone MP from Sikkim, has the unique distinction of being the first ever IIT-IIMer in the Lok Sabha.
