Ravi Shankar Prasad, the new minister for telecom, also gets IT, law & justice porfolios

NEW DELHI: Senior BJP leader and party spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad was on Tuesday named the new telecom minister in the Narendra Modi cabinet.

Like his predecessor in the UPA government, Kapil Sibal, Prasad will hold both communications and law & justice portfolios.

Born on August 30, 1954, in Patna, Prasad, a lawyer and politician, was deputy leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha. He holds a masters degree in political science from Patna University and also a law degree.

He began his political career as a student leader in the 1970s organising protests against the late Indira Gandhi’s government. He also worked in the student movement in Bihar under the Jayaprakash Narayan’s leadership and was imprisoned during the Emergency.

During his college days, Prasad was assistant general secretary, Patna University Students Union, and member of the senate, finance committee, arts & law faculties of the university.

In the past, Prasad has held positions of minister of state in the ministries of coal and mines, law & justice and information & broadcasting in the previous Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government.

As Kapil Sibal's successor, Shankar's biggest challenge would be to come up with policy initiatives to recharge a debt-laden and litigation-prone sector that was once the poster-boy of India’s economic reforms.

He would also be expected to rejig mergers & acquisitions laws and ring in spectrum trading & sharing to abet consolidation. Another key challenge would using his legal skills to reduce litigation in the telecom sector. This apart, he would also be expected to take the tough calls on retrospective taxes to mend the unresolved Vodafone and Nokia tax cases, and in turn, restore confidence of global investors.

In the run-up to the Budget, it remains to be seen whether Kumar announces confidence boosters such as a reduction in telecom taxes & levies down to APAC levels of 5% from 30% in India. He also has the responsibility likely to speed up the Rs 20,000-crore national optic fibre network (NOFN) project to ring in `broadband for all’ as envisaged in National Telecom Policy 2012.

Son of senior advocate Thakuar Prasad, one of the founders of Jan Sangh, Prasad is married to Dr Maya Shankar, professor of history at Patna University, and has a son and a daughter. His sister Anuradha Prasad owns News 24, a news channel, and is wife of Congress leader Rajeev Shukla.

Like Prime Minister Modi, Prasad frequently posts messages on micro-blogging site Twitter where he has 36,900 followers with 181 tweets. An avid reader of historical and biographical literature, Prasad has also been a university-level table tennis player.