By Parvathy VK
Raghuram G. Rajan has been appointed as the 23rd Governor of Reserve Bank of India succeeding D. Subbarao whose tenure will be ending on coming September. The appointment of new Governor has been viewed with much expectations and views that the new man will be able to revive the economy from its present bottlenecks. Here is a brief look at Mr. Raghuram G. Rajan and his credentials which substantiate his appointment as the RBI Governor at this tough period.
Raghuram G. Rajan was born to an IPS officer in Bhopal in 1963 to a Tamil family. He was abroad till his 7th year of school, having lived in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Belgium, and in 1974, he moved back to India from Belgium. Then he did the rest of his schooling in Delhi. In 1985, he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and he completed the Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1987. Rajan was a gold medalist in IIT Delhi (jointly with Sharad Malik, now the Chair of Electrical Engineering in Princeton) and IIM Ahmedabad. He received a PhD in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1991 for his thesis titled “Essays on Banking”. After graduation, Rajan joined the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. He was then appointed as the youngest-ever Economic Counselor and Director of Research (chief economist) at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from October 2003 to December 2006. In 2003, he was also the inaugural recipient of the Fischer Black Prize awarded by the American Finance Association for contributions to the theory and practice of finance by an economist under age 40. The Center for Financial Studies (CFS) has awarded the 5th Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics to Raghuram G. Rajan for his highly influential contributions in a remarkably broad range of areas in financial economics. In November 2008, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointed Rajan as an honorary economic adviser. That same year, a high-level committee on financial reforms, headed by Rajan, submitted its final report to the Planning Commission. Replacing Kaushik Basu, Rajan was appointed as Chief Economic Advisor to the Ministry of Finance, Government of India on 10 August 2012. He also prepared his very first Economic Survey for India for the year 2012-13, on the 27th of February. On August 6 2013 it was announced that Rajan would take over as the next RBI Governor. He is member in the Group of Thirty. He has been appointed RBI Governor for a term of 3 years. The current RBI Governor D Subbarao’s term ends on 4th September 2013. Mr. Rajan would be the first non IAS officer in 10 years to steer RBI. The previous Non-civil servant was Mr. Bimal jalal whose tenure ended in 2003. Mr. Rajan would be one among the youngest RBI Governors to occupy the chair. Let us hope that Mr. Rajan can do well in his tenure overcoming the grim mood that has been swiped across the nation for the last few months. Overcoming all these hurdles and making the economy steady is matter of great challenge. But, let us be optimistic that, Mr. Rajan will work out his strategies effectively keeping in mind his predecessors opinion that being the head of a central bank is a lonely job.