He spent time working in the field of aircraft instrumentation and designing audio recorders for anti-submarine warfare in the US before returning to India and becoming an entrepreneur in 1974.

Chavan was also General Secretary of the All-India Congress Committee (AICC), in-charge of many states, including Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Haryana, Gujarat, Tripura, and Arunachal Pradesh.

He has been involved in the Indian National Congress bureaucracy for most of his adult life, notably as a member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of the India's Parliament) and later architect of the civil nuclear liability bill.

He became chief minister of Maharashtra in 2010 at the insistence of Congress President Sonia Gandhi succeeding unrelated Ashok Chavan.

He contested the 2024 legislative assembly elections from the Karad South constituency but lost by a huge margin to Dr. Atulbaba Suresh Bhosale of the BJP.

After graduation in 1967, he won a UNESCO scholarship in Germany and later moved to pursue a Master of Science degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Reasons for his choice reported by the media included the perception that he had a "clean image" and that he did not have his own faction of political supporters within the state.