Jairam Ramesh, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha

Jairam Ramesh is an Indian economist who served in the V.P Singh’s Government in 1990 and in Manmohan Singh’s finance ministry in the Narasimha Rao administration. He was an advisor to Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram between 1996–98. He went on to serve as Deputy Chairman, State Planning Board, Government of Karnataka and on the Economic Advisory Council of Andhra Pradesh. In 2004 he was elected to Rajya Sabha from Adilabad district in Andhra Pradesh. Subsequently, he was inducted into the cabinet in Manmohan Singh’s administration. He was re-elected in 2010 to Rajya Sabha and was made the Minister of Rural Development and Minister of Drinking Water and Sanitation. After he was appointed the minister for environments and forests, he banned the use of bulls as performing animals, which later snowballed into the ban of Jallikattu in Tamil Nadu in 2016. He was elected to Rajya Sabha for the third term in 2015.