Biography

Raj Chengappa is a veteran journalist of over 40 years’ standing. He is currently the Group Editorial Director (Publishing) of the India Today Group, Asia’s leading media house with interests in publishing, television, radio, and the web. Raj is concurrently Editor of India Today magazine, the Group’s flagship and the country largest read news magazine, which has a combined readership of 16 million for its English and Hindi editions. As Editorial Director of the Group’s publications, Raj also oversees Business Today, India’s No. 1 business magazine, Readers Digest,
Robb Report and Auto Today.

Prior to his current assignment, Raj was Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune Group of Newspapers, one of India’s oldest and most respected publications. Before joining The Tribune, Raj was Managing Editor of India Today and worked there for 29 years handling very major department. He was concurrently the Editor of the Indian edition of Scientific American and India Today Aspire, a magazine on careers and education.

Raj has varied interests and is a specialist in political analysis, foreign affairs, security, nuclear weapons, the environment, science, health, education and development. Apart from editing publications, he has done over a hundred cover stories and exclusive reports for India Today on these subjects. He chronicled India’s nuclear weapons history in his widely acclaimed book ‘Weapons of Peace, The Secret Story of India’s quest to be a Nuclear Power.’

He has covered major international events and wars and interviewed prominent domestic and international leaders. He has twice interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he took charge in May 2014. He had also interviewed Dr Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister soon after he concluded the Indo-US nuclear deal. Among the international leaders he has interviewed is French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and President Pervez Musharraf, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajpaksha.

He has covered the 1999 Kargil War, the 2001 Afghanistan War, the 2003 Iraq War, and the 2008-09 Sri Lankan Civil War apart from chronicling India’s foreign policy and security issues including the Indo-US nuclear deal. He has also

written extensively on environment and development and was a member of the Indian Prime Minister’s Climate Change Council from 2006-2014. He covered the Paris Climate Change summit in 2015 for the India Today Group and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

He was President of the Editors Guild of India from 2015 to 2018, the premier body representing over 200 newspaper, magazine and television editors in the country. He won the Prem Bhatia award for Excellence in Reporting in 1998. He is also the winner of the Statesman Award for Rural Reporting in 1987. He is a recipient of the Rajyotsava Award in 2002, Karnataka state’s highest award. He was a Stimson Fellow on Security Issues in Washington D.C. in 1995, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1990-91 and a Harry Brittain Fellow partly at Oxford University in 1985.