Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia

Who is Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia?

Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia is an Indian politician. He is a current Member of Parliament, a member of the Indian National Congress party, and the Union Minister of State for the Ministry of Power. In the Indian parliament, Scindia, represents the Guna constituency in the state of Madhya Pradesh. He has recently been named among prospective Indian National Congress candidates for the Chief Ministership of Madhya Pradesh. Madhya Pradesh is one of the poorest states in India, with two thirds of its children malnourished, with its under-five malnutrition rate higher than most countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and with a large number of new mothers and infants dying shortly after childbirth, according to UNICEF.

Scindia is one of the wealthiest ministers in the government of India and, in addition, a claimant to property worth Rs. 20,000 crores or $3.27 billion belonging to his late father, Madhav Rao Scindia, a titular hereditary Maharajah of Gwalior State, which before 1947 was a princely state in the British Indian Empire. Scindia was appointed Minister of State for Power in November 2012 in a cabinet reshuffle which drafted a number of younger politicians into the Indian cabinet, including two other scions of princely families, R. P. N. Singh and Jitendra Singh. Scindia was tasked by the Indian Planning Commission with preventing a repetition of the July 2012 India blackout, the largest power outage in history, which affected over 620 million people, about 9% of the world population, In May 2013, Scindia claimed that checks and balances had been put in place to prevent any recurrence of grid collapse and that India would have the world's largest integrated grid by January 2014.