Who is present financial minister of India?

P. Chidambaram (Tamil: à®ª. à®šà®¿à®¤à®®à¯à®ªà®°à®®à¯) or Chidambaram Palaniyappan (or sometimes mistakenly referred Palaniappan Chidambaram) is an Indian politician. He is the present Finance Minister of India, in the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

[edit] Background & Education
Palaniappan Chidambaram, or PC as he is popularly known in the Indian press, was born on 16th September 1945, in the village of Kanadukathan in Sivaganga District of Tamilnadu state. He was born into an affluent family. He studied at Presidency College, Chennai, India and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree, and then studied law at the Law college of the University of Madras, Chennai, and received his Bachelor of Law degree. He later went to Harvard Business School where he got a Master's in Business Administration (MBA). In 1968, he married Nalini, a successful lawyer in her own right. They have a son, Karti Palaniappan Chidambaram.

[edit] Career as Lawyer
In 1969, he enrolled as an Advocate in the Madras High Court and established a successful law practice. He was designated as a Senior Advocate in 1984. He has chambers in Delhi and Madras and practices in the Supreme Court and in various High Courts in India. He has also appeared in a number of arbitration proceedings, both in India and abroad.

[edit] Politics and Ministerial Portfolios
Chidambaram was first elected to the Lok Sabha (Lower House) of Indian Parliament from the Sivaganga constituency of Tamil Nadu in general elections held in 1984. He was re-elected from the same constituency in the general elections of 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998 and 2004.

He was inducted into the Union (Indian federal) Council of Ministers in the government headed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on 21st September 1985 as a Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Commerce and then in the Ministry of Personnel. He was elevated to the rank of Minister of State in the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions in January 1986. In October of the same year, he was appointed to the Ministry of Home Affairs as Minister of State for Internal Security. He continued to hold both offices until general elections were called in 1989. The Congress government was defeated in the general elections of 1989.

When Chidambaram was first given a ministerial post, he was one among a relatively young, well educated class of men brought into government by then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1984. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in May 1991 during an election campaign appearance in the state of Tamilnadu; in the general elections the following month a wave of sympathy for the assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, and a disunited opposition brought the Congress party back to power. Manmohan Singh, a leading economist and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (Indiaâ€™s central bank) was made Finance Minister in the new government headed by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, essentially the first technocrat on the job in post-independent India. Manmohan Singhâ€™s reforms began taking India away from the erstwhile Soviet-style centralised planning, into a liberalized, free market economy.

In June 1991, Chidambaram was inducted as a Minister of State (Independent Charge) in the Ministry of Commerce, a post he held till July, 1992. He was later re-appointed Minister of State (Independent Charge) in the Ministry of Commerce in February 1995 and held the post until April 1996 . He made some radical changes in Indiaâ€™s export-import (EXIM) policy, while at the Ministry of Commerce.

In 1996 Chidambaram quit the Congress party and joined a breakaway faction of the Tamilnadu state unit of the Congress party called the Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC). In general elections held in 1996, TMC along with a few national and regional level opposition parties formed a coalition government. The coalition government came as a big break for Chidambaram, who was given the key cabinet portfolio of Finance; this put him in the limelight. Although the coalition government was a short-lived one (it fell in 1998), it showed Chidambaramâ€™s competence as Finance Minister, a factor which was to lead to his reappointment to the same key portfolio in the government formed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2004.

In 1998 the Bhartatiya Janata Party (BJP) took the reins of government for the first time and it was not until May 2004 that Chidambaram would be back in Government. Chidambaram became Minister of Finance again in the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance government on 24th May 2004. During the intervening period Chidambaram made some experiments in his political career, leaving the Tamil Maanila Congress in 2001 and forming his own party, the Congress Jananayaka Peravai, largely focused on the regional politics of Tamil Nadu. The party, however, failed to take off into mainstream Tamil Nadu or national politics. Just prior to the elections of 2004, he merged his party with the mainstream Congress party.