Dr. Deepankar
Chakrabarti
Director, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Indore Professor — OM & OR | Area Chair, Business Analytics
What did you want to be growing up?
A scientist — preferably one who built things, not just published about them. Software engineering and analytics let me do both.
A leader that inspires you?
Dr. Verghese Kurien — for showing that data, supply chains, and dignity are not separate conversations.
Your go-to comfort food?
Bengali macher jhol with steamed rice. The kind of meal that argues with jetlag and wins.
Describe your current role
I'm Director at Jaipuria Institute of Management, Indore, Professor of Operations Management & Operations Research, and Area Chair for Business Analytics. After 30+ years building commercial software and analytics systems across India, Australia, the USA, the UK, Germany, Japan, and Canada, I now spend most of my week translating that field experience into AI/ML, GIS, and Knowledge Management courses for our MBA students — and into a research agenda the campus can actually point to.
What role does institute culture play in your work?
Analytics campuses everywhere chase the same tools. What separates them is whether the culture lets students ask 'should we even do this?' alongside 'can we?' Jaipuria Indore takes that ethical layer seriously. We pair tools — Python, GIS, ML — with the institutional consulting work I did for the World Bank, the Government of Mizoram, PRADAN, and Ramakrishna Mission. Students see that real analytics is one part code, three parts judgment.
From Struggles to Smiles
Highs and lows of the journey
Highs: shipping integrated business information systems for ministries and NGOs, teaching at IIM Indore, and now watching MBA students who'd never touched Python build deployable models by their final term. The lows are the projects that died before they were lived in — the years of consulting where a great system met a government that wasn't ready. Both have made me a far more honest teacher.
What do you love beyond the classroom?
Reading across natural resource management and spatial analytics — the two fields I think will define India's next twenty years. I tinker with open-source GIS in my spare time, edit and peer-review for national and international publications, and when the schedule allows, I'm on a long walk explaining ML to whoever in my family is unfortunate enough to be next to me.
Selected Talks
"Analytics gives you the courage to be specific. Use it to ask better questions, not to win arguments faster."
