The Public Record
Profile of
C. R. Patil
A factual account of the career of Shri Chandrakant Raghunath Patil — technical trainee, police constable, party organiser, four-term Member of Parliament, and since June 2024 Union Minister of Jal Shakti.
- Full name
- Chandrakant Raghunath Patil
- Born
- 16 March 1955
- Constituency
- Navsari, Gujarat
- Current office
- Union Minister of Jal Shakti, since June 2024
At a glance
- Name in public life
- C. R. PatilAlso rendered C. R. Paatil in several Government of India records and on his own social accounts. This site uses C. R. Patil throughout for consistency.
- Date of birth
- 16 March 1955
- Place of birth
- Pimpri Akarout, Jalgaon district, MaharashtraHe is the first non-Gujarati to have held the presidency of the Bharatiya Janata Party's Gujarat unit.
- Parents
- Shri Raghunath Patil and Smt. Sarubai Patil. His father served as a police constable.
- Education
- Industrial Training Institute, SuratA vocational trade qualification. No university degree appears in his member record.
- Earlier service
- Gujarat Police, from 1975, joining as a constable
- Joined the BJP
- 1989
- Lok Sabha
- Member for Navsari since 2009 — 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th Lok Sabha
- Languages
- Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and English, as listed in his member record
- Family
- Married. His Lok Sabha member record lists four children.
Biographical particulars follow the Lok Sabha member record for Navsari (Member ID 4452) and published reference compilations. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved.
Background and education
Chandrakant Raghunath Patil was born on 16 March 1955 in the village of Pimpri Akarout, in Jalgaon district in northern Maharashtra. His father, Raghunath Patil, was a police constable; his mother was Sarubai Patil. The family connection with Gujarat, where his entire public career has since been made, was formed early: his schooling and training were completed in Surat.
His formal qualification, as recorded in his Lok Sabha member profile, is from the Industrial Training Institute at Surat. This matters for reading the rest of the career accurately. An ITI certificate is a vocational, trade-based qualification, not a university degree, and it placed him on a technical and service route rather than a professional or academic one. He is listed in parliamentary records as speaking Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and English.
Early professional life
In 1975, at twenty, he joined the Gujarat Police as a constable — the same rank his father had held. Published accounts agree on the year he joined and on the rank, but differ on when the service ended: some reference compilations give 1984 and others 1989. Both are in circulation; neither could be confirmed against a primary Government of India record for this site, and so both are reported here without a preference. What is not in dispute is that he spent roughly a decade and a half in uniform before entering public life, and that he did so from the bottom of the rank structure.
His Lok Sabha member record lists his profession as agriculturist and businessperson. He has also been associated, in published accounts, with a Gujarati-language newspaper, Navgujarat Times, from 1991. That association is widely reported but is set out here as reported rather than as verified from a primary source.
Entry into public life
He joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1989 and began in city-level organisational work in Surat, holding office as the city unit's treasurer and later as a vice-president. Organisational work of this kind — membership drives, booth-level structure, fundraising, managing the mechanics of a city unit — is the least visible part of a political career and often the most formative.
His first executive office in the public sector came in 1998, when he was appointed Chairman of Gujarat Alkalies and Chemicals Limited, a state public sector undertaking. He also served on advisory committees attached to the Chief Minister of Gujarat and to the state's Revenue Ministry, and on the party's state parliamentary board. He held no elected office during this period; his first election contest was in 2009, at the age of fifty-four.
Offices held
Chairman, Gujarat Alkalies and Chemicals Limited
A Gujarat state public sector undertaking. His first executive appointment in the public sector.
Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha, Navsari
Elected at four consecutive general elections — 2009, 2014, 2019 and 2024 — serving in the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th Lok Sabha.
President, Bharatiya Janata Party, Gujarat
Held the state party presidency for a little over five years. He was the first person from outside Gujarat to hold the post. He was succeeded by Shri Jagdish Vishwakarma on 4 October 2025; this is a concluded office and not a current designation.
Union Minister of Jal Shakti
Sworn in as a member of the Union Council of Ministers on 9 June 2024 and allocated the Jal Shakti portfolio, with charge of both departments of the ministry.
Parliamentary career
Navsari was created as a parliamentary constituency under the delimitation of 2008 and first went to the polls in 2009. C. R. Patil won that first contest and has represented the seat without interruption since, with a recorded vote share that has risen at each election — from about 56 per cent in 2009 to 78.24 per cent in 2024.
In earlier terms he served on the Standing Committee on Defence and on consultative committees attached to the ministries of Food Processing Industries and, later, Petroleum and Natural Gas, as well as on the Committee on Government Assurances. Since taking ministerial office his position in the House has changed in a way that is worth stating plainly: a minister answers questions rather than asking them, so the usual comparative measures of an MP's participation do not apply to him. The parliamentary career page sets out the full election results, the committee record and that distinction in detail.
Current ministerial office
As Union Minister of Jal Shakti he holds a portfolio that was itself assembled only in 2019, when the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation was merged with the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. The combined ministry is responsible, through two departments, for irrigation and water resources, inter-state rivers and the Ganga programme on one side, and for rural drinking water and rural sanitation on the other.
In practice the office is answerable to Parliament for the Jal Jeevan Mission, the Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen), the Namami Gange Programme and the national water-conservation campaigns, and for the technical institutions beneath the ministry — among them the Central Water Commission, the Central Ground Water Board and the National Mission for Clean Ganga. He is supported by two Ministers of State, Shri V. Somanna and Dr. Raj Bhushan Choudhary.
An important qualification applies throughout this site. Water and sanitation are State subjects under the Constitution. The Union government funds, sets standards and monitors; State governments and Gram Panchayats build, own and operate. National programme figures are therefore returns made by States and Union Territories, and they are not presented here as the personal achievement of any office-holder.
A note on the name
Both C. R. Patil and C. R. Paatil appear in official use. Press Information Bureau releases use both spellings, sometimes within the same month; his own verified social accounts use Paatil. This site uses C. R. Patil consistently, and Chandrakant Raghunath Patil where the full name is appropriate, while quoting official document titles exactly as issued.
Sources and references
- Lok Sabha member profile, Navsari (Member ID 4452), Parliament of India — sansad.in
- MP Track Record, 18th Lok Sabha, PRS Legislative Research — prsindia.org
- Ministry of Jal Shakti, Government of India — jalshakti.gov.in
- Navsari parliamentary constituency results, 2009 to 2024, as compiled from Election Commission of India returns
- Published biographical reference compilations, used only where no primary record was available and identified as such in the text
Last updated: September 2026