Kiran Karnik

Karnik has authored/edited a large number of publications, and lectures occasionally at major national institutes. He is the author of The Coalition of Competitors: The Story of Nasscom and the IT Industry [HarperCollins, 2012]. He is a regular columnist with national newspapers, including the Economic Times.

Karnik took up the position of President of NASSCOM in September 2001, after the sudden demise of its founder Dewang Mehta. He made the organisation into the preeminent association for the outsourcing industry and a prominent lobbying group for the concerns of the industry abroad. He left the organisation in 2008.

Karnik joined the Indian Space Research Organisation shortly after it was set up in 1969 and spent nearly 20 years in the organisation. He was part of the team that conceptualised the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment which won wide national and international acclaim, including the first UNESCO-IPDC Prize for rural Communication. Mr. Karnik was Director of the ISRO's Development and Educational Communicational Unit from 1983 to 1991. Mr. Karnik left the ISRO and joined the Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC) as its first Director in 1991. CEC was set up by the University Grants Commission to co-ordinate and oversee the functioning of media centres in the universities. In 1995, Mr. Karnik joined Discovery Networks as its managing director in India and oversaw the launch of Discovery Channel in South Asia in August 1995 followed by Animal Planet in 1999. He left the company in 2001.

Kiran Karnik was born in 1947 in the Indian state of Maharashtra to Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu parents. He completed his BSc(Hons) in Physics from Bombay University and a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management from the Indian Institute of Management,(Ahmedabad).