Jha was born in Bihar and was raised in Kolkata, West Bengal, where he went to school at St. Joseph's College. He then attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur where he did his bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering, (but perhaps more significantly, had his first brush with journalism as the editor of the campus magazine, Alankar, where his first short fiction appeared). After graduating from IIT, he went to the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he received his M.A. in 1990. Jha was an Assistant Editor (News) at The Statesman in Kolkata, a Senior Associate Editor at India Today, New Delhi, and since 1996 has been with The Indian Express first as Deputy Editor and then as Executive Editor. He is now Managing Editor. He lives in New Delhi.