The Centre has announced that economist Rajiv Kumar is the new vice-chairman of Niti Aayog, after Arvind Panagariya decided to return to Columbia University at the end of the month. The vice-chairman had explained his interest in academia to Prime Minister Narendra Modi some time back, and finally decided to pursue his interest.
Arvind is an Indian-American scholar and professor at Columbia. He was chief economist at the Asian Development Bank, and had also been employed at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Rajiv Kumar is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and has been involved in the selection of financial sector regulators, such as the RBI governor and Sebi chief, and appears compatible to the ruling BJP's economic ideology. He remains one of the very few economists who had backed demonetisation. Kumar is also chancellor of the Gokhale Institute of Economics and Politics in Pune, and the founding director of Pahle India Foundation- a non-profit research organisation that specialises in policy-oriented research and analysis.
