Dr Nageswaran was invited last month to be interviewed for the post, vacated by Michael Patra in January 2025, by the search panel headed by the Cabinet Secretary. He was widely seen as one of the frontrunners for this post.
Dr Nageswaran was first appointed Chief Economic Advisor to the Finance Ministry in January 2022, just before the presentation of the 2022 Economic Survey.
The other 7 interviewees for the RBI DG’s post include Poonam Gupta of NCAER, Chetan Ghate of IEG, Prachi Mishra of Ashoka University, Suresh Babu of Madras School of Economics and Prof Bhanumurthy of NIPFP.
Interestingly, the government search panel had also interviewed two other prominent bureaucrats—Ashish Vachani, an Additional Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs, and Ritvik Pandey Secretary to the 16th Finance Commission. Both are IAS officers: Vachani is a 1997 Tamil Nadu cadre officer and Pandey is one batch junior, from the Karnataka cadre. Both have been at the heart of policy-making in the Finance Ministry.
CNBC-TV18 had learned that the RBI DG’s job is likely to go to a candidate outside North Block. Michael Patra, a career RBI officer whose retirement has created an opening at the Central Bank, was appointed Deputy Governor of the RBI in January 2020, and was assigned to look after the RBI’s monetary policy department, among others. This made him an ex-officio member of the RBI’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).
(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)
