Amar Patnaik is an Indian politician who served as an Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&AS) officer and former principal accountant general (PAG) of Sikkim, Odisha, West Bengal, and Kerala. He graduated from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, a master’s degree in finance and systems from the Xavier’s Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, a master’s degree in Public Management from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was offered the British Chevening Gurukul Scholarship for Excellence at the London School of Economics by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government in 2013 and in 2015; he completed an advanced management development programme from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also completed an inter-disciplinary doctorate from the Xavier Institute of Management (XIM) university in Bhubaneswar and thesis was published as a book by Palgrave Macmillan titled “Institutional Change and Power Asymmetries in the context of Rural India” in 2016. He has frequently written on data protection and views personal data privacy as a fundamental right and has opined for an independent data protection body in India especially with regard to the imminent onset of artificial intelligence and He has written about mistrust in Indian communities arising due to asymmetries in economic and social power.