Roger Gaikwad

Roger Gaikwad (born February 13, 1953) is the present General Secretary of the National Council of Churches in India (comprising Protestant and Orthodox Church Societies in India) and has been in office since 2010.

Gaikwad also served as a Senator of the Senate of Serampore College (University), the nation's first University from 2011-2014 representing the Presbyterian Church.

After Gaikwad's graduate studies at the Wilson College, Mumbai, he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in honours (special) by the Bombay University. For ministerial formation, Gaikwad enrolled at the Leonard Theological College, Jabalpur, a Seminary where the Old Testament Scholar Wolfgang Roth once taught, affiliated to the nation's first University as a Methodist student from where he obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree awarded by the Senate of Serampore College (University) after his three-year course from 1974-1977. During Gaikwad's stint at the Aizawl Theological College, Aizawl, he went on study leave and enrolled at the North India Institute for Post Graduate Theological Studies, a joint initiative of the Bishop's College, Kolkata and the Serampore College, Serampore where he pursued a Master of Theology degree specialising in Religions. During the penultimate year of his study, Gaikwad moved to Bangalore and pursued a one-year special course at the United Theological College, Bangalore in 1981, then under the Principalship of Joshua Russell Chandran, where he worked on his dissertation entitled Karma and Transmigration in Modern Hinduism: An evaluation of the interpretation of the concepts of the thought of M. K. Gandhi, Aurobindo and S. Radhakrishnan.