Hyderabad: Senior diplomat Dr K Srikar Reddy, currently India’s Consul General in San Francisco and the man who negotiated New Delhi’s trade pacts with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Mauritius, is likely to be appointed India’s next Ambassador to Qatar, according to a report in Telangana Today.
Reddy, a 2001-batch Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer, would take over a mission that has been without a full-time envoy since Vipul, a 1998-batch officer who had headed the Doha embassy since August 2023, was named India’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in June this year.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has not issued a formal announcement. Appointments of this nature are notified by the ministry after the receipt of agreement from the host government.
If confirmed, Reddy’s arrival in Doha would coincide with the most commercially active phase in the India-Qatar relationship in years.
Before moving to San Francisco, Reddy served as Joint Secretary in the Department of Commerce, handling India’s commercial engagement with Africa and West Asia. He was India’s chief negotiator for the India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which came into force in May 2022, and for the India-Mauritius Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement (CECPA), operational since April 2021.
India and Qatar have been working towards a bilateral free trade agreement, with Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal indicating earlier this year that both sides were looking at a mid-2026 signing. Separately, India and the Gulf Cooperation Council formally launched negotiations for a bloc-wide FTA in February this year, with the UAE and Oman agreements serving as the template.
Qatar is India’s single largest supplier of LNG as well as LPG, and during Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani’s visit to New Delhi in February last year, the two countries elevated ties to a strategic partnership and set a target of doubling trade to USD 28 billion by 2030. Qatar also committed to investing USD 10 billion in India.
Reddy is a medical graduate of Kakatiya Medical College in Telangana’s Warangal and hails from Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district, according to reports, though his official profile lists Warangal district as his place of birth.
His postings have included the Indian missions in Germany and Switzerland, and the Permanent Mission of India to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, where he served as Counsellor between 2014 and 2017. He was Consul General in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, from 2017 to 2020. At headquarters, he has handled India’s relations with Pakistan and with East and Southern Africa.
As Regional Passport Officer in Hyderabad between 2011 and 2014, he oversaw an overhaul of passport services in the then undivided Andhra Pradesh, and the office won the Passport Seva Puraskar in 2013, the first time it had done so.
The Doha assignment would be his first in the Gulf.
Should the appointment go through, Reddy would be the second person from Telangana to head the mission in Doha. Prof S Bashiruddin, former head of the Department of Journalism at Osmania University, served as India’s Ambassador to Qatar from October 1983 to April 1986.
Qatar is home to an estimated eight lakh Indians, the country’s largest expatriate community, a sizeable number of them from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
