Prannoy Roy

Prannoy Lal Roy (born 15 October 1949) is an Indian economist, chartered accountant, psephologist, journalist and author.

He is the former executive co-chairperson of NDTV and is considered to be one of its co-founders, along with his wife Radhika Roy.

NDTV was the first independent news network in India.

Prannoy Roy is also credited for pioneering opinion polls in the country.

Prannoy Roy was born in Calcutta, West Bengal on 15 October 1949, to P. L. "Hurricane" Roy, a Bengali executive at a multinational corporation in the city.

His paternal grandfather was Paresh Lal Roy, a traffic superintendent and an amateur boxer, known as the "father of Indian boxing" for having popularised the sport in the country.

Paresh Lal gave his grandson Prannoy the nickname of "Tempest" when he was a child.

Roy is the great grandson of suffragist and social reformer Lolita Roy and grand nephew of Indra Lal Roy, the first Indian flying ace.

He is also a cousin of writer Arundhati Roy.

Roy attended La Martiniere Calcutta and The Doon School, the private boys' boarding school in Dehradun, Uttar Pradesh (now in Uttarakhand).

He was at the boarding school during his teenage years when he met Radhika Das, whom he would later marry.

Radhika was also from the city of Calcutta and was sent to the Welham Girls' School, another boarding school in Dehradun.

Prannoy and Radhika moved to London, United Kingdom for their higher education.

Prannoy had received a Haileybury and Imperial Service College scholarship to acquire the A-level higher secondary certificate.

Following his schooling, he enrolled at the Queen Mary University of London and graduated in 1973 with first class honours in economics.

He then became a certified chartered accountant and a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales in 1975.

Prannoy and Radhika also got married in London and then returned to India, settling down in Delhi.

Roy is described to have been passionate about election results since his childhood and had produced his first election forecast for the 1977 Indian general election.

The forecast was published by the Mainstream magazine and had predicted a victory for the Janata Party.

In India, Prannoy continued his studies at the Delhi School of Economics from where he attained a PhD in agricultural economics in 1978.

Following his doctorate, Roy became a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers India where he worked from 1979 till 1983.

In the 1980s, he began collaborating with the Oxford political scientist David Butler and Indian economist Ashok Lahiri in an effort to mainstream the field of psephology in India.

The collaboration produced three book and Roy became an election analysts for the India Today magazine.

Roy is credited for pioneering opinion polling in India between 1980 and 1995.

For the 1984 Indian general election, Roy produced an extremely accurate election forecast which predicted an Indian National Congress victory with 400 seats.

The prediction earned him the reputation of being the most successful psephologist in India.

New Delhi Television Ltd (NDTV) was founded in 1984 as a production firm for international news broadcasters and the public service broadcaster Doordarshan.

Radhika and Prannoy Roy are considered to be the co-founders of the company, however Prannoy states that Radhika was the original founder as he joined the company later.

Radhika Roy was working as a journalist at The Indian Express and then at the India Today magazine before becoming the founder of NDTV.

Doordarshan was initially wary of allowing private production houses to cover domestic news, and NDTV was contracted to produce a weekly international news programme called The World This Week for the public broadcaster.

The weekly was instant success among its Indian audience and attained one of the highest viewerships on Doordarshan.

Prannoy Roy in the meantime worked as an associate professor for a year in 1985 at the Delhi School of Economics.

In 1986–1987 he was hired in a team of economists to build a macro-econometric model of India for the Ministry of Finance, the model is the largest of its kind.

Doordarshan eventually contracted NDTV to cover the general election results and budget session specials.

The first televised coverage of an election result in India was produced by NDTV for the 1989 Indian general election.

Roy began his career as a television journalist by covering the general election for Doordarshan.

Following which, he also began appearing as a news presenter in The World This Week programme.

Both the election results coverage and the international news show were widely successful.

According to Roy, it was not difficult to appear good in comparison to Doordarshan which he described as more radio than television and that the time period was the most "newsiest" in television history.

NDTV requested for and received a contract from Doordarshan to produce a daily news bulletin on domestic affairs called The News Tonight on its second channel in 1995.