New Delhi: Vikram Misri has assumed charge as the Foreign Secretary on Monday succeeding Vinay Mohan Kwatra. A career diplomat from the 1989 batch of the Indian Foreign Service, Ambassador Misri has served in various capacities at the Ministry of External Affairs, in the Prime Minister’s Office in New Delhi and in various Indian Missions abroad in Europe, Africa, Asia and North America.
His assignments in New Delhi have included work on the Pakistan desk of the Ministry of External Affairs and stints on the staffs of two Foreign Ministers I.K. Gujral and Pranab Mukherjee.
Apart from serving as the joint secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, he has also served as private secretary to three Prime Ministers of India IK Gujral, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi.
Known as China specialist, ambassador Misri has served abroad in Brussels, Tunis, Islamabad and Washington D.C. He was Deputy High Commissioner of India in Sri Lanka and Consul General of India in Munich.
He was appointed India’s Ambassador to Spain in 2014, Ambassador to Myanmar in 2016 and Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, where he served from January 2019 to December 2021. He was most recently the Deputy National Security Adviser (Strategic Affairs) of India, a post he held from 01 January 2022 to 30 June 2024.
Ambassador Misri was born in Srinagar and had his early education there (Burn Hall School and DAV School) as well as in Udhampur (Carmel Convent School) in Jammu and Kashmir.
He finished his schooling from the Scindia School in Gwalior and went on to earn a Bachelor’s degree with Honours in History from the Hindu College, University of Delhi and an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur.
Before joining the government, he worked for three years in the private sector in the fields of advertising (Lintas India - Bombay and Contract Advertising - Delhi) and advertising film-making.
Ambassador Misri is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute USA´s India Leadership Initiative (now the Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellowship). He speaks fluent Hindi, English and Kashmiri and has a working knowledge of French.
