Mithileshwar Jha is Professor of Marketing at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He has a postgraduate degree in management from IIM Ahmedabad, where he is also a Fellow. Previously, Professor Jha served as a faculty member in leading Indian management institutes like IIM Lucknow, the Institute of Rural Management, Anand, and XLRI, Jamshedpur. While at IIM Lucknow, he held the position of the Escotel-CRM Chair and Dean of Academics. Professor Jha has been a British Council visiting professor at Buckingham University, UK and a visiting professor at ESCP-EAP, France.
Professor Jha's teaching and research interests include product-market strategy, relationship marketing, social marketing, services marketing, rural marketing, and management of development programs and institutions. In a career spanning more than two-and-a-half decades, Professor Jha is credited with having defined rural marketing in India, and contributed to national-level policymaking in the areas of public distribution systems, handlooms, and biogas. He was a founding chairperson of the Nadathur S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at IIM Bangalore, which is mandated to incubate and promote entrepreneurship among young management graduates. He has also published a number of articles in leading journals. He has also contributed three chapters to A Manual for Culturally Adapted Social Marketing, edited by Dr. T. Scarlett Epstein. Actively involved with the industry, Professor Jha has worked on a wide range of projects. He has served as a consultant with international agencies like the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), NORAD, and the Canadian Hunger Foundation.
He has also conducted training programs for organizations like Sadolin Paints (Oman) Ltd., Ambit-RSM, Kirloskars, Tata, Honda Siel Power Products, MICO-Bosch, Grasim Industries, HMT Ltd., Indian Telephone Industries Ltd., BPL, Siemens India, Reliance Industries, Ranbaxy, Berger Paints, and the government of India. He was a member of the working group on public distribution system of the Planning Commission, set up by the government to develop strategies for the eighth five-year plan. Having served as a member of the boards of IIM Bangalore, IIM Lucknow, and the Gandhi Peace Centre, he is currently on the boards of Karnataka Soaps and Detergents Ltd.