Mr Nitin Desai

Mr Nitin Desai is an Indian economist and international civil servant. He was Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations from 1992 to 2003. He studied at St. Xavier’s High School and Elphinstone College in Mumbai. In 1962 and 1965, he obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Bombay and a master’s degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science respectively.

In his early days of career, from 1965 to 1970, he delivered lectures in economics at the University of Liverpool and the University of South Hampton in the United Kingdom. Later in the year 2003, he was awarded as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2003–04. In July 2004 he was inducted as an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Mr Desai began his career with the Indian Government in 1973 in the Planning Commission of the Government of India and served in various capacities. In 1983, he served concurrently as Secretary of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. From September 1985 to March 1987, he served as Senior Economic Adviser for the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) where he introduced the concept of sustainable development and was responsible for drafting the key chapters dealing with this aspect in the report of the Commission "Our Common Future".

In 1987 he returned to India and was made Special Secretary in the Planning Commission. A year later he was appointed Secretary and Chief Economic Adviser in the Dept. of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance.

He was the Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs in the UN, where his major contributions included the organisation of a series of global summits, notably the Rio Earth Summit (1992), the Copenhagen Social Development Summit (1995), the Monterrey Finance and Development Summit (2002) and the Johannesburg Sustainable Development Summit (2002). He oversaw the creation of the Commission on Sustainable Development in the UN and was the first Under Secretary General for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development. In October 2001, the Secretary-General asked Desai to act as Secretary-General of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002 Johannesburg Summit).

At the end of August 2003, he retired from the UN. Still, he continued his association with the UN as a Special Adviser to the Secretary-General for the World Summit on the Information Society. In that capacity, he chaired an international multi-stakeholder Working Group on Internet Governance.