Secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Alkesh Kumar Sharma is among 10 eminent persons from around the world appointed by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on his inaugural Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Leadership Panel.

In line with the mandate of the IGF and as recommended in the Secretary-General's Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the Secretary-General has established the Panel as a strategic, empowered, and multistakeholder body to support and strengthen the IGF.

In addition, the Panel consists of five ex-officio members, including Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology Amandeep Singh Gill as well as senior representatives of the current, immediately previous, and immediately upcoming IGF host countries.

The Panel will address strategic and urgent issues and highlight Forum discussions and possible follow-up actions, in order to promote greater impact and dissemination of IGF discussions according to its Terms of Reference.

The 10 members of the Panel have been appointed by the Secretary-General following an open call for nominations, and in line with an equitably distributed, multistakeholder configuration of ministerial-level Government representatives, executive-level representatives of the private sector, civil society and the technical community, as well as at-large prominent persons in the field of digital policy.

Others members of the panel are Vint Cerf from the United States, Hatem Dowidar from Egypt, Lise Fuhr from Denmark, Maria Fernanda Garza from Mexico, Toomas Hendrik from Estonia, Maria Ressa from the Philippines and the USA, Karoline Edtstadler from Austria, Gbenga Sesan from Nigeria, and Lan Xue from China. They will serve a two-year term during the 2022 23 IGF cycles.

The IGF is an outcome of the Tunis phase of the World Summit on the Information Society that took place in 2005.

In the Tunis Agenda, Governments asked the Secretary-General to convene a new forum for policy dialogue to discuss issues related to key elements of Internet governance.

The mandate of the Forum was extended for another 10 years in December 2015, during the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the overall review of the implementation of the World Summit on the Information Society outcomes. The 17th edition of the Forum will take place from November 28 to December 2 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.