Prakash Tandon was born in 1911. He graduated in science from Government College, Lahore, in 1929. He studied commerce at the University of Manchester and subsequently qualified as a chartered accountant. In 1937, he joined the Unilever subsidiary in India and later became its first Indian chairman. He left the company in 1968 to join the public sector, serving as the chairman of the State Trading Corporation of India for four years and that of the Punjab National Bank for three years. He was also the director-general and president of the National Council of Applied Economic Research. He has taught at Los Angeles, Berkeley and Boston universities and the Universities of Punjab and Delhi, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and the Indian Institute of Technology, both at Delhi and Kharagpur. He is currently the vice-chairman of the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in Delhi.