New Delhi: Born on August 16, 1968, Arvind Kejriwal is the Chief Minister (CM) of Delhi since February 2015. He previously served as CM from December 2013 to February 2014, stepping down after 49 days. He is the national convener of Aam Aadmi Party (AAM). His party won the 2015 Delhi legislative assembly elections with a majority, obtaining 67 out of 70 assembly seats.
Kejriwal is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and worked in the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) as a Joint Commissioner of the Income Tax Department in New Delhi. In 2006, he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership recognising his involvement in the grass roots movement ‘Parivartan’ [change] using right-to-information legislation in a campaign against corruption.
The same year, after resigning from IRS, he donated his Magsaysay award money as a corpus fund to found the Public Cause Research Foundation, a non-governmental organisation (NGO).
In 2012, he launched AAP, and the party won in the 2013 Delhi legislative assembly election. On February 14, 2015, he was sworn in as CM for a second term after his party’s victory in the assembly polls.
After joining politics, Kejriwal claimed in 2013 that he had chosen public service over earning hundreds of millions as an Income Tax Commissioner. This led to a controversy, with the IRS association pointing out that he has never been promoted to the rank of Commissioner of Income Tax.
