Ashok Alexander

Ashok Alexander studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, the Delhi School of Economics and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He went on to have a long career with McKinsey & Company in New York and India. In 2003, he left that firm as a senior partner to create an ambitious HIV/AIDS prevention programme in India named Avahan, for the Gates Foundation. This initiative is credited with having averted over 6,00,000 HIV infections. In 2013, Ashok was a senior fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, teaching a course on leadership lessons from Avahan.

Ashok now nurtures his own NGO, The Antara Foundation, which works in the field of maternal and child health. It is a grassroots operating entity working in remote rural areas of three Indian states-Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. When time allows, he chases his passion for painting and chess, both of which he has pursued at the national level. His first book, A Stranger Truth, describes his work with Avahan and won the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2019.