Dr. Uday Balakrishnan is formerly from the Indian Postal Service (1975 batch). He has worked across India in areas of logistics, banking, insurance, financial inclusion, child, women and unorganised labour, human resource development, as well as vigilance and anti-corruption in India’s postal services and in the larger Government of India. His academic interests are contemporary history and public policy and is especially focused on India-China relations. He was a visiting fellow at several prestigious institutions: the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) twice (once long-term) Visiting Fellow at the Central European University (CEU) Budapest, now in Vienna, and later Visiting Faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies- IISc.
The universities and institutions Dr. Balakrishnan has engaged with in Europe and India, include Jawaharlal Nehru University – New Delhi, Central European University—Budapest, the German Institute of Advanced Study - Wissenschaftskolleg - Berlin, the Ruhr University- Bochum, NIAS and IISc. Dr. Balakrishnan has taught a popular public policy and contemporary history course, to undergraduate students pursuing B.Sc. by Research programme at the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru since 2014. His book India on My Mind - Reflections on Politics, Democracy & History brought out by the Centre for Policy Studies Visakhapatnam in 2021 is under revision for a leading publisher.