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| Personal details | |
| Residence(s) | Noida,India |
| Alma mater | Indian Institute of Technology |
| As of 3 January, 2010 | |
Pradip Baijal is an officer of the Indian Administrative Service who retired as chief of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. He is a 1966 batch officer from the Madhya Pradesh cadre. He is part a long list of IAS officers who have spent time at Oxford University for specialised training.
Pradip Baijal held senior administrative positions in the Ministry of Finance and industries at state level but he first came into prominence as the disinvestment secretary in the BJP Govt on 1999 and was part of the team that was involved in the disinvestment of various Govt companies like BP, VSNL, IPCL and Maruti. He was appointed chairman of TRAI in a critical phase in 2003 when Arun Shourie of the BJP was minister, and then for a brief time with Dayanidhi Maran. He retired as the Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in March 2006.
Career
Pradip Baijal joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1966. In a distinguished career spanning four decades, he held a diverse set of portfolios in both the central and state governments. Of his several achievements, some of which were made under very challenging circumstances, most notable are:
Pradip Baijal is the chairman of Noesis Strategic Consulting Company and is doing advisory work for Indian, MNC clients, foreign government / regulators, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), World Bank etc. in power, telecom, broadcasting policy and regulation, steel and mineral sectors, India entry strategies, public private infrastructure projects etc.
He worked in the Central Power Ministry for six years from 1994 to 2000, and was in charge of privatization and reforms in the Ministry. In this assignment, he assisted the government in writing the rules of liberalisation of the sector, set up State and Central Electricity Regulatory Commissions, seperated generation, transmission and generation and initiated reforms.
Later, he was Secretary Disinvestment and in this assignment, wrote the entire rules for disinvestment and implemented privatization, leading to very large revenues for the Government. Later as Chairman, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, he facilitated an explosive growth in the sector by appropriate regulation.
He has to his credit various published articles in noted journals and periodicals. Pearson has recently published his book on Disinvestment in India – I Lose and you Gain. The book shows how India earned more by privatizing 5 percent of the Government of India’s equities in comparison to very large privatizations in China and Russia.
Baijal has trained telecom regulators on behalf of the World Bank (Infodev) in Africa. He similarly works for ITU in Southeast Asia and has also undertaken restructuring of telecom regulation in Lao, Myanmar, and Oman, and has lectured ministers and regulators in Southeast Asia on reforms and regulation. He had also taken training classes on power regulation in 1999, in Vietnam. He is on the boards of Nestle, GVK, and Patni Computers, and advisory boards of the India Oil Corporation, Infrastructure Development Finance Company. For a few months in 2009, he was the chairman of an advisory committee to the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board in India.
As Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), from 2003 to 2006 he changed cost plus regulation to competition regulation in India leading to an unparalleled growth in the sector. So significant was the effect of many regulatory changes brought about by him that India achieved a target Teledensity of 15%, prescribed for 2010 in 2006 itself, with a consensus forecast that 2010 will see a density more than 30 to 40%. Several international bodies, including Shosteck, an independent US-based research company, It actvily achived 50%. The US Regulator, have lauded his achievements at the TRAI.
As Secretary of the Ministry of Disinvestment (set up to oversee the Government of India's privatization programme), he was instrumental in not only conducting several landmark transactions but also laying down the entire gamut of rules and regulations for privatization and disinvestment standardizing procedures. During his tenure a large number of public sector companies were successfully privatized: BALCO, Modern Foods, Hindustan Zinc, Maruti Udyog, VSNL, CMC, Jessops, HTL, PPL, many properties of the Hotel Corporation of India and ITDC. The aggressive disinvestment initiatives that he mostly spearheaded garnered USD12.5 billion or 10% of India's total annual budget outlay.
At both the TRAI and the Ministry of Disinvestment Mr. Baijal often had to deal with strong opposition to the Government's initiatives from both the political establishment and the business community. This obviously resulted in its share of controversy. Undaunted, Mr. Baijal pushed ahead and finally achieved more than most had expected.
Previous assignments include senior positions in the Government of India - in the Ministry of Power where, apart from overhauling the regulatory structure in line with the Government of India's reform programme, he initiated the unbundling and subsequent privatization of some of the state electricity boards; in the Ministry of Steel where he oversaw the setting up of Vizag steel plant, a project unique in many ways, in the Ministry of Agriculture (Fertilizer) he was responsible for rationalizing and privatizing the handling of imported fertilizers in 1982, when few had heard of privatization in India..
Mr. Baijal's career in the Madhya Pradesh State Government, as Principal Secretary, as chairman of nine industrial corporations, and as Secretary, Finance and Commercial Taxes saw him introduce several previously unattempted reforms including the privatization of a couple of corporations and the roll-out of a World Bank-European Union sponsored soybean project resulting in Madhya Pradesh earning the sobriquet of "soybean state of India". It was in these assignments that he built the foundation for a guiding tenet that would hold him in good stead throughout, that of "getting it done".
Mr. Baijal is a Mechanical Engineer from I.I.T. Roorkee, and was a visiting fellow at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University from 1987 to 1988. He is a prolific writer and commentator on subjects close to his heart - telecom and privatization. His papers and articles have been published in several noted journals and newspapers.