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A journey from North Block to Mint Street
Former bureaucrat Shaktikanta Das was named the new governor of the Reserve Bank of India after Urjit Patel abruptly resigned amid a face-off with the government over issues related to governance and autonomy of the central bank.
By
migrator
migrator
New Delhi
“The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has approved the appointment of Shaktikanta Das, former Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, as Governor of the RBI for a period of three years,” an official order said.
For a career bureaucrat who was equally at ease with three different finance ministers, the journey from North Block to Mint Street has often seen him adopting a non-confrontational approach and building consensus on tackling tricky issues.
Considered an efficient implementer and a team player, Das may be the right man in RBI that has seen a governor quit for the first time in almost three decades amid tensions with the finance ministry over governance and autonomy issues.
Das, a 1980 batch IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, is a post graduate in history from the Delhi University but had mostly worked in economic and finance departments in the state and the centre during his 37-year-long tenure.
The man, who fielded questions on the day the Modi government made the shock announcement of junking overnight 86 per cent of the currency in circulation, first came to the finance ministry as a joint secretary in 2008 when P Chidambaram was the finance minister.
Das will be the 25th Governor of the RBI. The rare blip on his otherwise illustrious career came in June 2016 when BJP’s Subramanian Swamy took a veiled dig that a case pending against Das for allegedly helping Chidambaram “swallow” real estate in Mahabalipuram.
The attack was over a period when he was industry secretary in the TN government. Jaitley came out in his defence saying he fully backed him and “an unfair and false attack on a disciplined civil servant” was being made.
Das is practitioner, not academic, says former colleague
The illustrious career of the just-in RBI Governor can be traced to the springboard start that he got in TN. From being instrumental in setting up the country’s first IT park – Tidel, kick-starting the plug-and-play realty play, he has lent shape to several marquee projects.
He had a hand in TN getting its limelight as a prime industrial hotspot, wooing investors and industrialists (global and local) to the state. A former bureaucrat of TN cadre, referring to him as SKD, said “Das has worked in Finance Dept of TN government from the mid-1980s. So, his foundation is solid. Das has worked as both Secretary Revenue and Secretary DEA under the present dispensation and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. So, he is fully aware of the priorities.”
Having been a Member of 15th Finance Commission, SKD has toured all the States and heard their fiscal issues first-hand, said the former bureaucrat, who, went on to add that his recent participation in G-20 had made him fully aware of international monetary issues without being a US varsity professor.
“Compared to his two immediate predecessors (Raghuram Rajan & Urjit Patel), SKD is not an academic but a practitioner of government’s fiscal policies like the two predecessors even before (YV Reddy & Subba Rao),” he added. To sum up, the government has reverted to a career civil servant after trying out two renowned academics as RBI Gov, he said, in a lighter vein.
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