Agrawal was born on July 24, 1951, in Kashipur of the Nainital district, which was then a part of Uttar Pradesh.
[1] Later, he was a member of technical staff at the AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he worked from 1982 to 1988 on semiconductor lasers and nonlinear fiber optics.
[2][6] In 1996, he was elected as the fellow of IEEE for "contributions to the development and understanding of semiconductor lasers and fiber-optic communications systems.
In 2015, he was awarded the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal by the Optical Society for "inspiring and educating a generation of scientists and engineers involved with fiber-optic communications and other photonics technologies through his seminal textbooks and high-impact scientific articles".
Agrawal has authored or co-authored more than 500 research papers in internationally reputed scientific journals and has made more than 200 conference presentations.
Another book Fiber-Optic Communication Systems, first published in 1992 and currently in its fifth edition, is used as a standard textbook in many universities for courses on telecommunication.