The Prime Minister’s Global Advisory Council is based on the idea that the highly skilled overseas Indian community represents a vast untapped resource that can be harnessed as an input into national development processes in India.

The Council will specifically focus on the promotion of business-to-business partnerships, creating appropriate institutional mechanisms that can leverage knowledge, skills and expertise possessed by the overseas Indian community for socio-economic development processes in the country, and channelising the substantial overseas Indian philanthropic efforts in India into priority.

The Prime Minister will chair the Council. Its members will include the External Affairs Minister, the Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs, senior designated officials from the Government of India, and prominent overseas Indians who have accepted the Prime Minister’s invitation to be members. They are:

Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati is a professor at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been Economic Policy Advisor to Arthur Dunkel, Director General of GATT (1991-93), Special Advisor to the UN on Globalization, and External Advisor to the WTO.

Karan Faridoon Bilimoria is an entrepreneur and a life peer. Best known as the founder and chairman of Cobra Beer, Bilimoria is the chairman of the UK-India Business Council. In 2005, he became Chancellor of Thames Valley University — the United Kingdom’s youngest university chancellor at the time. In 2006, he was chosen as a cross-bench life peer with the title Baron Bilimoria, of Chelsea in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea by the House of Lords Appointments Commission, becoming the first-ever Parsi in the House of Lords.

Swadesh Chatterjee: Born in Somamukhi, West Bengal in 1947, Chatterjee first arrived in the United States in November 1978 with his wife and young daughter. He became an American citizen in 1993. During the last 20 years Swadesh has risen to prominence within the Indian American Community, not only in his home state of North Carolina, but also nationally. In 1998, he was elected National President of the Indian American Forum for Political Education, a nationwide organisation whose goals are to boost the political participation by members of the Indian American Community and to improve the relationship between the United States and India.

Ela Gandhi, granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi is a peace activist and was a Member of Parliament in South Africa from 1994-2004, where she aligned with the African National Congress (ANC) party representing the Phoenix area of Inanda in the KwaZulu Natal province. Her parliamentary committee assignments included the Welfare, and Public Enterprises committees as well as the ad-hoc committee on Sullogate Motherhood. She was an alternate member of the Justice Committee and served on Theme Committee 5 on Judiciary and Legal Systems.

Rajat Kumar Gupta is the current special advisor on management reforms to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. He is also an independent director at Goldman Sachs and is a member of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago.

Renu Khator is the eighth chancellor of the University of Houston System and 13th president of the University of Houston. Before assuming the position in January 2008, she served as provost and senior vice-president at the University of South Florida. Khator is the first foreign-born president of the university, and the second woman to hold the position.

Lord Khalid Hameed was the executive director & chief executive officer of the Cromwell Hospital in London. He hails from Lucknow, India. He chairs the Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council. He is a Board member of the British Muslim Research Centre, and also the Ethnic Minorities Foundation. He is an executive member of the Maimonides Foundation and a trustee of the Little Foundation. Dr Hameed supports various charities and was awarded the Sternberg Award of 2005 for his contribution to further Christian-Muslim-Jewish Relations.

Kishore Mahbubani is the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. From 1971 to 2004 he served in the Singaporean Foreign Service, ending up as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations. In that role he served as president of the United Nations Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002.

Lakshmi Mittal is an Indian industrialist based in the United Kingdom. He is the fourth richest man in the world with a net worth of around $45 billion. He was born in Sadulpur village, in the Churu district of Rajasthan and he resides in Kensington, London. He is the chairman and CEO of ArcelorMittal (founder of Mittal before merger with Arcelor) and also serves as a non-executive director of Goldman Sachs, EADS and ICICI Bank.

P.N.C. Menon is a noted philanthropist and is engaged in several charitable and social projects in India, which include a skill development project in Kerala for the economically weaker sections of the society. He has also built a home for senior citizens and widows, a healthcare centre and an exclusive educational institution of global standards for underprivileged children.

Indra K. Nooyi is the chairperson and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, the world’s fourth-largest food and beverage company. According to the Forbes magazine polls, Nooyi ranks third on the 2008 list of ‘The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women’. In 2008, Nooyi was also named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report.

Bhikhu Chhotalal Parekh was born in 1935 and was raised to the peerage as Baron Parekh of Kingston upon Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire in 2000. His career achievements include being a political tutor at the London School of Economics, a politics lecturer at Glasgow University, and Professor of Political Theory at University of Baroda. Lord Parekh is a member of the Select Committee on Human Rights and is the founding member and past president of the research committee on political philosophy of International Political Science Association.

C.K. Prahlad is a management consultant, author, and the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He has authored several international bestsellers, including: Competing for the Future (with Gary Hamel) in 1994, The Future of Competition (with Venkat Ramaswamy) in 2004 and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits in 2004. His new book with co-author M.S. Krishnan is called The New Age of Innovation.

Ajit Singh has been chairman and an executive director of Nam Fatt Corp. Bhd since September 19, 2003. Tan Sri Dato Ajit Singh served in various positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at Malaysian Missions in Canberra, Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and New York. He was Malaysia’s Ambassador in Vietnam, Austria, Brazil (with concurrent accreditation to Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela) and Germany. He was elected as the first Secretary-General of ASEAN and served from 1993 to 1997.

Amartya Sen is a Bengali Indian economist, philosopher, and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, “for his contributions to welfare economics” for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty, and political liberalism. From 1998 to 2004 he was Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, becoming the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college.

Vikram Pandit is the CEO of Citigroup. Pandit was a professor at Indiana University Bloomington before joining Morgan Stanley. As head of Morgan Stanley’s institutional securities division from 1994 to 2000, he pushed the company further into electronic trading and helped to build prime brokerage services that catered to hedge funds. The Indian government awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 2008. On December 11, 2007, Pandit was named the new CEO of Citigroup, replacing interim-CEO Sir Winfried Bischoff, who became chairman of the board while remaining as CEO of Citigroup Europe. Interim chairman Robert Rubin strongly supported Pandit, who is the effective successor to Chuck Prince.

Sam Pitroda born in Titlagarh, Orissa, is an inventor, entrepreneur and policymaker. Currently chairman of India’s National Knowledge Commission, he is also widely considered to have been responsible for India’s communication revolution. He is the Chairman of World-Tel Limited, an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) initiative. He holds many key technology patents, has been involved in several startups, and lectures extensively around the world on management, governance and the implications of communication and information technology. He has also served as an advisor to the United Nations.

Shashi Tharoor is a writer and an Indian diplomat at the United Nations. In 2006, he was the official candidate of India for the office of United Nations Secretary-General, and came second out of seven official candidates in the race. Tharoor served as the UN Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information between June 2002 and February 2007, during the term of Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is an author, journalist, and fellow of the USC Centre on Public Diplomacy.

Prof. Srinivasa SR Varadhan is an Indian-American probabilist. Since 1963, he has worked at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, where he is currently a professor. Varadhan is known for his work with Daniel W. Stroock on diffusion processes, for which he received the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1996, and for his work on large deviations with M.D. Donsker, for which he was awarded the Abel Prize on March 22, 2007 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Yusuf Ali M.A. is a prominent NRI businessman and managing director of Emke Group. Emke is best known in the Gulf through a chain of hypermarkets, supermarkets and department stores, which serve the widest segments of multi-ethnic residents in the region.