Mr. Soumya Chattopadhyay
Senior Programs Officer, India Resident Mission, Asian Development Bank
Mr. Soumya Chattopadhyay has an overall work experience of more than 30 years with 19 years in the Government of India (GOI), more than 5 years as a Programs Specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and 6 years as a Regional Cooperation Specialist (consultant) in ADB.
Mr. Chattopadhyay held important responsibilities in key Ministries of the GOI, such as the Department of Economic Affairs, Commerce, Planning Commission, Petroleum and Natural Gas, and Health and Human Resource Development. At the time of leaving the Government, he was holding the post of Joint Director General of Foreign Trade in the Department of Commerce. After leaving the GOI he joined ADB as a permanent staff.
Mr. Chattopadhyay studied at Sciences Po, Paris from 2006-2008 where he was a Chanel scholar in the Master of Public Affairs (MPA) program. He holds MPA (Cum Laude) degree. He holds another master’s degree in Sociology (First Class) from India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. He completed his graduation from Kolkata’s Presidency College with Honours in Political Science.
In the ADB, he is currently looking after project development in India and regional cooperation in South Asia. He is associated with ADB’s flagship South Asia Subregional Economic Cooperation program for more than 11 years first as a consultant and then as a staff. Currently, he is on a short-term assignment in Bangladesh to support an upcoming program of the ADB to help Bangladesh graduate from the Least Developed Country status and prepare a new program to improve logistics efficiency. He is also the project officer of some of the key interventions of the ADB in India e.g. a $500 million policy loan to India for the development of Industrial Corridors, Tripura Industrial Infrastructure Sector Development Program.
He is also the project lead of two significant studies of ADB for the GOI- the Industrial Park Rating System study and the feasibility study on the development of the North East Economic Corridor. He has published working papers and policy briefs from the ADB on regional cooperation, trade, and transport facilitation.