Young managers from top firms barter fat pay checks to join political system

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

MUMBAI: Come June, Vaibhav Lodha will swap his pinstripes for crisp white khadi. The 27-year-old manager with Bangalore-based analytics company Mu Sigma is set to leave a high-paying job, where he is serving his notice period, to work as a consultant for parliamentarian Anurag Thakur in Himachal Pradesh.

A yearning to make an impact on a bigger stage goaded Lodha, an engineer from NIT, Trichy, and management graduate from IIM, to join the young parliamentarian in Shimla to develop a labour market strategy for the region.

Lodha is not the only young honcho to hang up his corporate boots to explore the political system as a serious career option. Chetan Kanoongo, till recently an analyst with Deloitte; Varun Santosh, a former business analyst with HSBC; and Geeta Ramakrishnan, a former fraud risk manager with Ernst & Young, are among a group of young qualified corporate professionals willing to forfeit fat pay checks and stable jobs to do public good.

“There has been a definite paradigm shift over the years with professionals considering participation in the political system as a serious career option,” says Lodha, a finalist at the Indian National Mathematics Olympiad.

Source: The Economic Times (link opens in a new window)