Armed with World Bank & Stanford cred, Nara poised for key role in AP’s development

Amaravati: Stanford graduate and former World Bank official Nara Lokesh, the 41-year-old son of TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu, is poised to play a key role in Andhra Pradesh’s development over the next five years.

In the earlier TDP government between 2014 and 2019, Lokesh served as minister for Information Technology, and he has been inducted again as a minister into the new NDA govt in the state.

Lokesh, who has an MBA degree from Stanford, also worked briefly in the World Bank’s e-governance initiative before plunging into Andhra Pradesh politics.

Though his initial foray into electoral politics in 2019 was a failure after he lost to YSRCP’s A Ramakrishna Reddy in Mangalagiri Assembly constituency, Lokesh has endeared himself to the electorate in the past five years.

His statewide ‘Yuva Galam’ padayatra of over 3,000 km became the key to propelling him to one of the largest victories in the 2024 polls, whereby he took the Mangalagiri seat by a margin of over 90,000 votes.

The NDA, comprising TDP, BJP and Janasena, won a landslide victory in the recently concluded simultaneous Lok Sabha and assembly elections in the state with a huge majority of 164 out of the total 175 asembly and 21 out of the total 25 Lok Sabha seats.