Dr Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani of the Telugu Desam Party has been sworn in as a member of the new Union cabinet.
He may be a newcomer to politics compared to his 542 colleagues in the 18th Lok Sabha but what 48-year-old first-time member of Parliament from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh Dr Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani has achieved may well cause envy to many of his fellow parliamentarians. He is a doctor by profession. He pursued his medicine at Osmania Medical College after clearing the entrance exam with a 27th rank. He then pursued his MD in internal medicine at Geisinger Medical Centre, Pennsylvania. He also spent five years working at Johns Hopkins University and Sinai Hospital, both in Baltimore.
Dr Pemmasani is also the founder of UWord, an online learning platform for high stakes competitive exams in the US. In 2020 he won the Ernst and Young Award as a young entrepreneur in the US.
TDP loyalist
He hails from a family of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) loyalists. His father Sambasiva Rao was a big fan of TDP founder N.T. Rama Rao. He joined TDP and served as deputy chairman of Nasaraopet town. Dr Pemmasani, too, joined TDP to support its leader Chandrababu Naidu. When in the US, he helped organize events there whenever Naidu visited the country.
He waited for the opportunity to fight elections in India. In the 2024 elections, he was allotted the Guntur seat vacated by another industrialist Jayadev Galla who quit politics. He beat the YSRCP candidate by a margin of 340,000 votes. He is considered to be one of the richest candidates to fight the 2024 elections. He has declared his family’s wealth at over ₹5,785 crore.
