Saraikela, also spelled Seraikella, is the administrative headquarters of Saraikela Kharsawan District of Jharkhand. Earlier it was a municipality in Pashchimi Singhbhum districtin the Indian state of Jharkhand. It was formerly the capital of the Oriya Saraikela State a princely state. The town is a road junction and agricultural trade centre, with nearby deposits of copper, iron-ore, asbestos, and limestone.

The Saraikela state was founded in 1620 by Raja Bikram Singh(a fore-runner to the ruling family's current nomenclature of Singh Deo), a descendant of the rulers of Porahat, who claimed descent from the Rathore clan of Rajputs. Porahat or Singhbhum Kingdom was a part or feudatory of Ganga Vanshi, Surya Vanshi Gajapati rulers of Orissa^{[citation needed]}.

The main business families of Seraikela include the Choudhary and Sahu families, who are involved in various business enterprises in Seraikela. Abhijeet Group (Corporate Ispat & Alloys Ltd.) is setting up its steel & power plant in Seraikela (7 km from Town). Jupiter Cement is also setting up a Portland cement plant nearby. Steel plant of Sesa Goa and Bharat Steel are also proposed in the area. The Adityapur industrial estate is a part of Seraikela district and has major anciallry units of Tata Motors. Adityapur Industrail Area also known as AIADA was once known as the largest industrial hub in India.Further,Chandil is also growing rapidly as an industrial centre and currently has a number of food processing and sponge iron units.

Gopal Prasad (born on July 31, 1945 in Ghazipur, India) is an Indian mathematician. His research interests span the fields of Lie groups, their discrete subgroups, algebraic groups, arithmetic groups, geometry of locally symmetric spaces, and representation theory of reductive p-adic groups.

He is the Raoul Bott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

He earned his bachelors degree with honors in Mathematics from Magadh University in 1963. Two years later,in 1965, he received his masters in Mathematics from Patna University. After a brief stay at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in their Ph.D. program for Mathematics, Prasad joined TIFR for his PhD program in 1966. There Prasad began a long and extensive collaboration with his advisor M. S. Raghunathan on several topics including the study of lattices in semi-simple Lie groups.In 1976, Prasad received his Ph.D. from University of Mumbai. Prasad became an Associate Professor at TIFR in 1979, and a Professor in 1984. He left TIFR to join the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1992, where he is the Raoul Bott Professor of Mathematics.