RBI appointments clear way for delayed MPC meeting

The Indian government has named three new members of the central bank’s monetary policy committee, allowing a delayed MPC meeting to be rescheduled for this week.

Two macroeconomists, Shashanka Bhide and Ashima Goyal, will join the MPC alongside finance professor Jayanth Varma, the government announced on October 5.

The Reserve Bank of India put out a statement today (October 6) saying the MPC meeting would now be held from October 7–9. The meeting was postponed last week just a day before it was due to start, after the government failed to appoint new members in time.

The six-member committee is made up of the RBI governor and two RBI officials, plus three external members. It requires at least four members to be present to make policy decisions, but the non-renewable terms of all three external members had expired.

Bhide is currently senior adviser for research programmes at the National Council of Applied Economic Research. He is an economist specialising in agriculture, macroeconomic modelling, infrastructure and policy analysis.

Bhide previously headed up a unit of the Institute for Social and Economic Change that is funded by the RBI. The unit studies development topics related to the central bank’s work, including rural credit delivery, international financial markets, inflation and exchange rate dynamics.

Goyal is a professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research and a member of the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council. She will step down from the latter role to take up the RBI position. She previously served on an RBI technical advisory committee for monetary policy.

Goyal’s research focuses on a range of macroeconomic topics relating to the Indian economy and emerging markets. She has written recently on growth, Indian money markets, monetary policy and inflation expectations. She is editor of the journal Macroeconomics and Finance in Emerging Market Economies.

The third new appointee, Varma, is a professor of finance and accounting at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He was previously a member of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, where he chaired several advisory committees. He was also part of the 2007 Raghuram Rajan Committee on Financial Sector Reforms, which proposed “a hundred small steps” to reform Indian finance. Rajan later became RBI governor.

Varma’s core research interests span financial markets and pricing models, including market micro-structure and regulation. His recent work has focused on Indian equity markets and the role of blockchain in finance.