Ajit Balakrishnan is an Indian entrepreneur, business executive and administrator. He is the founder, current Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of

Rediff.com Rediff.com (stylized as ''rediff.com'') is an Indian news, information, entertainment and shopping web portal. It was founded in 1996. It is headquartered in Mumbai, with offices in Bangalore, New Delhi and New York City. , it had more than 300 e ...

, an internet company based in

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...

. He was Chairman of the

Board of Governors A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organi ...

Indian Institute of Management Calcutta Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM Calcutta or IIM-C) is a public business school located in Joka, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It was the first Indian Institute of Management to be established, and has been recognized as an Institut ...

(IIM Calcutta) for two five-year terms ending in March 2017.

Education

Balakrishnan holds a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

from the

University of Kerala University of Kerala, formerly the University of Travancore, is a state-run public university located in Thiruvananthapuram, the state capital of Kerala, India. It was established in 1937 by a promulgation of the Maharajah of Travancore, Chit ...

and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management with Master in Business studies (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (1971).

Business

Balakrishnan's first business was Rediffusion, now known as Rediffusion DY&R (Dentsu Young & Rubicam), which he co-founded when he was 22. In 1995, he founded

, which became a highly successful internet site, and was listed on NASDAQ in 2001.

Writing

He writes a column in

Business Standard ''Business Standard'' is an Indian English-language daily edition newspaper published by Business Standard Private Limited, also available in Hindi. Founded in 1975, the newspaper covers the Indian economy, infrastructure, international busine ...

and has written a book published by

Macmillan Publishers Macmillan Publishers (occasionally known as the Macmillan Group; formally Macmillan Publishers Ltd and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the 'Big Five' English language publi ...

called The Wave Rider. He has co-authored a research paper, Generic Framework for a Recommendation System using Collective Intelligence, with Alkesh Patel which was presented at the International Conference on Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, 2009.

Public service

Balakrishnan served as the Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIM Calcutta for two five-year terms ending in March 2017. He presently serves on the Governing Council of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC). He was named Chairman Emeritus of the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). He has served as the Chairman of the Govt of India, Ministry of Information Technology Working Group on Internet Governance and Proliferation. He chaired a Committee appointed by India's Ministry of Human Resource Development on 'Research and Faculty Enhancement at the 7 IIMs'. He has served as a member of the Central Advisory Board of Education of the Government of India.http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/ROP_61CABE.pdf .

References

External links

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The Wave Rider
' {{DEFAULTSORT:Balakrishnan, Ajit Indian Institute of Management Calcutta alumni Businesspeople from Mumbai Indian chief executives Indian mass media owners University of Kerala alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Indian Internet celebrities Indian advertising executives Indian television executives