Ashok Gulati And Rajiv Kumar Appointed As Non-Official Directors On RBI’s Central Board

The Narendra Modi government on Thursday appointed two eminent economists, Ashok Gulati and Rajiv Kumar, as non-official directors on the central board of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for a four-year term. Manish Sabharwal, co-founder and chairman of TeamLease Services Private, was also appointed as part-time non-official director on the central board. This board is responsible for governing the affairs of RBI.

Gulati is an agricultural economist and has previously served as the chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices and the director of the International Food Policy Research Institute. Sabharwal is the co-founder at Hewitt Outsourcing Services India. Rajiv Kumar is a senior fellow at Centre for Policy Research and the founding director of Pahle India Foundation.

The new appointments take the number of external, non-RBI directors to nine. The government, according to the RBI Act, has the authority to appoint 10 members from different fields.

A proposal to appoint three members on the local board of RBI was also accepted by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet. Prasanna Kumar Mohanty, Vallabh Roopchand Bhanshali and Sunil Mitra have been appointed to the local board.