Courtesy Photo

Ranjit "Ricky" Gill

At 24, he may not be quite old enough to serve, but that has not stopped Ranjit Gill from raising a lot of money in his bid to win a seat in the United States House of Representatives.

His war chest, $446,484 as of June 30, is the third-highest gross nationwide for a non-incumbent Republican House candidate. If elected, Gill, a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, would become the third Indian-American elected to Congress. He would represent the Ninth Congressional District, a swing district that stretches from south of Sacramento to north of Manteca.

Both parties are watching the race. The National Republican Congressional Committee, for example, has begun an early barrage of ads and robocalls attacking Gill’s opponent, Rep. Jerry McNerney, an engineer from Pleasanton who is serving his third term and is a popular incumbent in a district that now leans Democratic.

The electoral map approved this week by California’s bipartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission could improve Gill’s odds. The reconfigured district now includes more of San Joaquin County, where Hispanics outnumber whites, while cities like Pleasanton, Dublin and Danville in central Contra Costa County have been moved to other districts. McNerney, 60, said he would move from Pleasanton to San Joaquin County.

While it is likely that the new district will lean Democratic, its new lines are a potential boon for Gill, who frequently promotes his Central Valley bona fides. He was born and raised in Lodi and spent his boyhood helping to harvest grapes on the family’s 1,000-acre farm in San Joaquin County.

“The shift dropped areas that he knows nothing about and knows nothing about him,” said Douglas Johnson, a fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College.

A first-generation Indian-American who speaks Spanish, Gill says he is uniquely suited to represent the growing nonwhite population, which makes up more than half the district. “As a campaign,” he said, “we will be able to speak people’s language literally and figuratively.”

Gill, who is known as Ricky, has staked out positions on major issues for the agricultural industry, including his support for diverting water to the San Joaquin Valley and the creation of a guest worker program.

Gill will turn 25 — the minimum age required to be a member of the House — a month before the June 2012 primary. He was 17 when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger chose him to serve as the student member of the State Board of Education. He attended Princeton University, graduating in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in public policy.

His parents, both obstetricians who moved to the area in the 1970s, are well known in the medical community and are plugged into a sprawling fund-raising network for local political causes, which Gill has tapped into from his campaign headquarters at the Flag City RV Resort near Lodi. All his campaign contributions are from individuals, including Princeton alumni, Indian-Americans and agricultural interests.

“There is a false notion that age correlates with experience,” Gill said. “Leadership is partly about experience, but it is also about vision.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.