Early Life
& Education
Where the record begins: a village in the Bikaner district, a college in the city of Bikaner, and three degrees taken across two countries. This section sets out only what the official record establishes.
20 December 1953
Kishmidesar, Bikaner
Sri Dungar College, Bikaner
M.A. · LL.B. · M.B.A.
Kishmidesar, district Bikaner
The Digital Sansad record gives his place of birth as “Vill. Kishmideshar, Distt. Bikaner (Rajasthan)” and the date as 20 December 1953. His father is recorded as Shri Lakhu Ram Meghwal and his mother as Smt. Heera Devi.
Kishmidesar is a village in the Bikaner district of western Rajasthan, in the Thar Desert. The district recorded an area of 30,247 square kilometres and a population of 23,63,937 in the 2011 Census — a density of roughly 78 persons per square kilometre. It is a landscape in which villages are widely separated, rainfall is scarce and irregular, and the twentieth-century history of the region turns on the arrival of canal water and the railway.
He belongs to the Scheduled Castes, and the constituency he now represents in the Lok Sabha is reserved for the Scheduled Castes. The official record does not publish an extended account of his childhood or family circumstances, and none is constructed here.
Three degrees
The official record states the qualifications and the institutions. It does not state the order in which the degrees were taken, and this record does not assume one.
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Degree I
LL.B.
A bachelor’s degree in law. Sri Dungar College, Bikaner, is named in the official record as one of the two institutions at which he was educated. A legal qualification is a direct antecedent of the portfolio he now holds, and of the interest recorded elsewhere in his biography in permitting advocates to argue in Hindi before the High Courts and the Supreme Court.
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Degree II
M.A. (Political Science)
A post-graduate degree in Political Science — the academic study of constitutions, institutions, elections and government. Taken, like the law degree, in Bikaner.
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Degree III
M.B.A., University of the Philippines
A Master of Business Administration from the University of the Philippines. The official record names the institution; it does not give the year. A management qualification taken abroad is an uncommon element in the record of an Indian parliamentarian of his generation, and it sits alongside a career in the administrative service rather than in business.
From study to the public service
The next stage established by the record is entry into the Indian Administrative Service, in which he served in the Rajasthan cadre. The official profile records the fact of that service without itemising postings; the Press Information Bureau describes him as a retired IAS officer from Rajasthan.
What the two stages have in common is the subject matter. A law degree, a degree in political science and a management degree are, between them, a training in the machinery of the state: the rules it operates under, the institutions that make those rules, and the administration that gives effect to them. The portfolios he has held since 2016 have largely belonged to the same territory.
Sources
- 1Digital Sansad, Lok Sabha — member biography, Shri Arjun Ram Meghwal (Member No. 4399), fields for date and place of birth, parents, education and profession.
- 2Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Law and Justice — Release ID 2024165, 11 June 2024, describing him as a Post-Graduate in Political Science, a Law Graduate, an M.B.A. from the University of the Philippines and a retired IAS officer from Rajasthan.
- 3Census of India 2011 — area, population and density figures for Bikaner district, reproduced with their census date.