Lok Sabha Polls 2024 | Face-off: ‘Aatral’ Ashok Kumar vs K E Prakash

The two are contesting from Erode.

Tamil Nadu’s richest candidate polls with assets valued at Rs 538 crore, 54-year-old Ashok Kumar is a philanthropist-businessman who had worked in firms like Intel and Microsoft.

After spending about 13 years in the US, Ashok Kumar returned to India in 2005 and is now running a group of educational institutions and other businesses. In 2021, he launched Aatral Foundation which runs low-cost canteens providing food at affordable prices to people in and around Erode.

The entrepreneur-politician has donated crores of rupees to construct additional buildings for schools, classrooms with better ambience, functional toilets and other similar amenities through his foundation.

Ashok Kumar’s mother K S Soundram was AIADMK MP from the then Tiruchengode constituency in 1991 and his mother-in-law is the sitting BJP MLA from Modakurichi, C Saraswathi. He quit the BJP and joined the AIADMK in November 2023.

A second-generation DMK man, K E Prakash was handpicked as the candidate from Erode by Udhayanidhi Stalin.

Prakash, who has been associated with the DMK since his school days, is currently the deputy secretary of the party’s youth wing. His father K S Eswaramoorthy is a party veteran, having been part of the DMK for the past five decades.

The businessman-politician has been in the youth wing ever since it was being headed by Stalin. He grew close to Udhayanidhi after he took over as the youth wing chief in 2019 and is credited for organising the youth wing conference in Salem earlier this year in a grand manner. He is testing his electoral fortunes in the Lok Sabha elections for the first time.

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